Justice is Blind
by Marcus S. Lazarus
Summary: When Angel hires a blind lawyer called Matt Murdock, he finds a new hero in town investigating a spree of murders targetting his old foes, the murders being committed by a face Matt knows all too well...
1. Catalyst

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **_Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

* * *

AN: For Daredevil, this is set a couple of years after Daredevil, around the same time as Elektra. For Angel and the gang, this is set after 'Hellbound', so Spike's still a ghost, but he can touch objects if he really wants it, and the gang are still getting used to running Wolfram & Hart.

* * *

AN2: Just to make it clear, I've never seen Elektra, so any information pertaining to that movie was acquired from second-hand sources. However, this is set before the events of Elektra, so, at this point, she's a remorseless killer who doesn't care about any collateral damage so long as she gets her targets

Blind Justice

Matt Murdock smiled as he walked into his new office, rapping his stick against the nearby window in an apparently casual manner that only his heightened senses could make sense of. As the sound waves spread around the room, he nodded slightly in approval; a good desk, two decent-sized filing cabinets (The writing in Braile, he hoped, although even his senses weren't that good yet), a light, two comfortable chairs (One behind the desk and one in front), and a computer with a microphone and large speaker system, evidently to help him if he couldn't use the keyboard correctly.

Walking towards the chair behind the desk (Taking care to come a bit too close to the wall on some occasions; he couldn't tell whether or not there were cameras in here and he didn't want people to start asking him awkward questions on his first day), Matt settled down behind his desk and ran his hands over the desk before him until he found the keyboard, then rapping the desk with his hand until the vibrations allowed him to locate the 'on' button. Pushing the button, he smiled as he felt the hard drive began to power up, then sat back to wait for the computer to come on.

"Everything OK?" a voice said from the door.

Matt jumped slightly in surprise- for once, this wasn't feigned, as he'd literally been unaware of someone coming into the room.

But how? Matt thought to himself. I should have been able to hear his heart, at least…

The figure then walked further into the room, and Matt noticed something else that didn't add up; unless the figure was actually moving, he didn't cause any other signals that might help Matt find him. No heartbeat… not even a breath…

Who is this guy? Matt asked himself, as he turned to wear he hoped the man was standing.

"Yeah, it's fine," he said, nodding at where the man seemed to be. "And you are?"

"Oh, sorry; my name's Angel," the man said, a brief air current indicating he reflexively offered Matt his hand before thinking better of it. "I was the one who sent Wesley to you with our job offer."

"Oh yeah…" Matt said, already chalking the situation up as a strange one.

His new boss didn't even need to breath? What was going on here…?

"So, why did you want to hire me anyway?" he asked, looking inquiringly in Angel's direction. "Wesley wasn't exactly clear on that point when we talked."

"It's easy enough," Angel said, as he sat down opposite Matt (Based on the squeak of the leather in the seat). "We only recently took charge of this firm, and it has… well, a bit of a bad reputation, to put it bluntly," he said, settling in one position as he stared at Matt; if nothing else, the air conditioning in Matt's office was proving to be helpful in keeping track of this man. "I was looking for lawyers with a good reputation, and your name cropped up; you seem to have handled a sizable number of clients on a strictly pro bono basis, which struck me as being exactly what we needed."

He sighed slightly; evidently, he still used oxygen, he just didn't seem to need it. "I'm just sorry we couldn't hire your partner as well, but it's hard to organize the money here."

Matt smiled. "Fair enough; I'm sure Foggy'll be fine running a secondary branch back in New York," he said reassuringly. "He's always wanted the chance to stand on his own two feet anyway."

Angel chuckled slightly, then seemed to glance at his watch (At any rate, his wrist moved) and stood up. "Got to go; I have an appointment. I'll call you if something comes up."

"Right," Matt said, turning back to the computer and reaching out for the microphone as Angel left the room. But, as the door shut behind the man with not even the slightest hint of a heartbeat, Matt made a mental note to find out what was going on there as soon as he could….

* * *

In an alleyway some blocks away from the main Wolfram & Hart office, a young man- barely fifteen years old- with long blond hair was walking through an alleyway, scanning his surroundings with an expression of seemingly clinical detachment on his face, the rapid movement of his head the only thing that suggested that he was slightly panicked.

His name was Ryan Anderson, and, although you wouldn't know it to look at him, he was one of the most dangerous beings alive, lacking even the slightest shred of human decency due to his lack of anything even slightly resembling a soul. He'd been treated to all kinds of conventional therapy to get rid of his violent tendencies- he'd even spent three years in an asylum- but nothing had worked. After all, how could you heal something that didn't exist?

Looking around himself, Ryan strained his ears, trying to catch the sound of his pursuer…

A dagger suddenly thudded into his back, severing his spinal column just between his shoulder-blades, cutting off the signals from his brain to his lungs, killing him instantly.

* * *

AsRyan's bodythumped to the ground, the figure that had been chasing him landed on the ground beside him, with an agility that was almost supernatural.

Reaching down to Ryan's body, the figure- all that could be seen in the shadows was a sexy female figure clad in black leather- pulled out the sai that had struck him, wiped it on what clean parts of Ryan's coat she could find, and then stood up, sliding the weapon back into its place on her belt as she turned away, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a mobile phone.

"He's dead," she said to her current employer.

"Excellent work, Miss Natchios," a voice said on the other end. "Just one or two more little tests, and then you'll meet the prime target."

The figure opened her mouth, as though about to ask something, but the voice beat her to it. "I apologise for the intrigue, but it is necessary; the prime target is a dangerous man, and my employers wish to be sure that you are capable of handling him in a combat situation. Have no fear, all your current targets are indeed dangerous in their own way; the world is better off without them."

The figure nodded in understanding and pocketed the phone.

Then, looking around to make sure there were no witnesses, Elektra Natchios turned and walked back into the dark alley.


	2. Beginning the Investigation

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

_**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

**IYWriterGirl: **Well, glad to hear I'm not the only one

**Spaceman:** Yeah, I know about Angel's old Daredevil-like foe, and I acknowledge that Daredevil uses more than his sonar sense, but it's what he's using at the immediate moment. And regarding the vampire thing… take into account, Matt's going to be slightly hampered by the fact that he doesn't believe in them…

**The Sithspawn: **Well, that's good to hear; hope you like this just as much

**LeoLupin:** Sorry about the delay

**Imzadi: **Maybe; I'll have to see how things work out… by the way, who's Alan Shore?

**DariusFF: **I'll do what I can; just take into account that Daredevil will be more than slightly hampered by the fact that he's only human, and he can't 'see' Angel unless Angel's in motion, what with Angel being technically dead and all…

**Cherrycoke: **Thank you; I hope I live up to your expectations

**Ragnhild: **You asked, and you have received

Blind Justice

"Well, now that the official details are out of the way, do we have anything else on the agenda?" Angel asked, looking around the meeting table at the others.

Gunn raised a hand. "Well, there is this one thing that looked odd," he said, looking at Angel. "There was news of this murder in the papers; it had all the appearances of being a professional murder, but the target wasn't really the normal victim of those kind of people. He was a fourteen year-old escaped mental patient; guy made a few enemies in his time, but none of them had the finances capable of hiring an assassin to target him."

Angel nodded thoughtfully as Gunn looked inquiringly at him. "Interesting, but not really our field," he said, after a few seconds reflecting on the information. "How'd it come to your attention?"

"It wouldn't have normally, but the subject was mentioned in a few of your records from your first year in the business," Gunn said, as he looked over at Wesley and Angel. "The kid was called Ryan Anderson."

Wesley and Angel looked up sharply at that.

"Wait a minute; _Ryan_?" Angel asked, looking at Gunn in shock. "You're sure?"

"Um… yeah," Gunn said, as he looked between the two of them. "Why, was there something about him we should all know?"

Wesley shook his head. "Not really; Ryan wasn't a particularly stable personality, to put it bluntly," he explained. "He literally had no soul whatsoever; he nearly killed his younger sister, Stephanie Anderson, before Angel was able to get her out of the house along with their parents. Ryan was sent to an asylum, and we never heard from him again."

"Wait a minute; no _soul_?" Fred asked, looking at Wesley incredulously. "But I thought that was something we're _all _meant to have no matter what!"

"In most cases, yes, but Ryan was… well, an anomaly, to put it bluntly," Wesley said, as he looked back at Fred. "Although, in all fairness, he _might _have had a soul; it's just that, if he did, it was the blackest Hell; an Ethros demon tried to possess him, and told us before we killed it that Ryan was the only thing it ever feared."

"Anyway, this isn't helping matters; shouldn't we be thinking about who/ what did this and _why_ it did it?" Lorne put in, looking over at Angel inquiringly. "After all, the guy may have been a soulless monster, but he never made any actual _enemies_, right?"

Angel nodded. "Good point, Lorne," he said, before looking over at Wesley. "Wesley, see if you can find out any extra information about the attack; Lorne, check your old contacts and see if you can find out anything about a hit that had been placed on Ryan lately."

"We're sure it's demon related?" Gunn asked, looking up at Angel inquiringly.

Angel nodded. "Ryan couldn't have made many enemies in the human world- nobody sends out assassins after mental patients- but demons who favour possession as a means of power wouldn't want somebody like Ryan active if they could help it; he's a danger to them more than he's a danger to humans."

A thought occurred to him, and he looked back at Wesley. "And while you're at it, take Matt with you."

Wesley looked up in surprise.

"Matt?" he asked Angel, evidently wondering if his friend had taken leave of his senses. "You mean… Matt Murdock? Our new lawyer? Why should I bring him?"

"Didn't you check his file, English?" Gunn asked his friend, smiling as he looked over at Wesley. "Murdock's got this _incredible _knack for knowing when someone's telling the truth or when they're lying to him; it's as though he's got a built-in lie detector or something."

"Exactly," Angel said, nodding in agreement to Gunn as he looked back at Wesley. "Trust me; if you're questioning people, Matt's your best candidate for knowing whether or not they're telling the truth."

Wesley nodded. "All right…" he said, before glancing up at Angel again. "I don't have to tell him about the supernatural aspect of it, do I?"

"Not unless you feel you have to," Angel assured him. "Just say that you found out about his abilities at working out the truth and wanted his opinion on the situation."

"Very well," Wesley said, as he stood up. "Then I'd best be off; the sooner the better, after all."

* * *

In a distant warehouse, left abandoned for at least three years after the previous owner- a vampire called MacKenna- had been staked by Angel after his attempts to create a world of permanent night was thwarted, the fit, slender, beautiful form of Elektra sat in the middle of the floor, legs crossed, as she stared out ahead at apparently nothing in particular, meditating to achieve the focus that had been denied her after her resurrection…

Then her mobile rang.

Sighing, Elektra stood up, stretched, pulled her phone out of her pocket, and held it up to her ear.

"Yes?" she asked.

"_Sorry for the delay, Miss Natchios, but we have located your next target_," the voice said on the other end of the line. "_He's currently only a few blocks down from your position, engaged in a… _gang _war_."

"I see," Elektra said, nodding in understanding. "Is it just him, or are there others I should be taking out?"

"_No, only him; he's the source of the trouble these days_," the voice explained. "_His name is Rondell, and he once came close to neutralising your prime target; we'd be interested in seeing how you handle him_."

"I see," Elektra said, nodding thoughtfully. "How will I know which one's him?"

"_He's the one with the crossbow_," the voice explained. "_Their 'gang' has a fetish for old-fashioned weaponry_."

"I see," Elektra said, as she terminated the call.


	3. Target Number Two

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **_Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

Blind Justice

As the door opened, Matt smiled slightly as he heard a new heartbeat enter the room; at least, to date, Angel was the only person in this firm who seemed particularly… unusual, to say the least. Having one person who he couldn't 'see' was bad enough; he really didn't need or want any more.

"Yes?" he asked, deliberately looking a foot to the left of where the man was actually standing. "Who is that?"

"My name is Wesley Wyndahm-Pryce, Mr Murdock," the man said, reflexively holding out his hand before remembering Matt's 'disability' and dropping it. "I manage our research department here, and have a little matter I'd like your assistance with."

"Really?" Matt asked, slightly intrigued at Wesley's offer. What kind of assistance could Wesley have in mind…?

"What's the problem?" he asked, deciding to get right to the point.

"An old… associate, for lack of a better term… of ours has been murdered," Wesley explained. "Angel and myself would like to find out more about the incident, and, well, we've read about your talents for knowing when people are telling the truth or lying…"

"You want my help?" Matt asked, smiling slightly at his new friend. "I'm ready when you are."

"Excellent," Wesley said, sounding slightly relieved; evidently he'd been uncertain whether Matt would be interested. "Shall we get on with this?"

"Indeed," Matt said, as he stood up, his cane in one hand, and began to walk towards the door, remembering to bump slightly into the desk as he did so. "Lead the way."

* * *

Dressed in a long brown coat and large hat that concealed her slim, athletic figure, Elektra rolled her eyes as she stared around at the alleyway she'd found herself in.

Why was it her targets for this client _always _seemed to favour hiding in the darker areas of the city? Honestly, a beautiful place like Los Angeles, and she ended up tracking and killing people in the worst areas…

Of course, she wasn't expecting her targets to live in the _best _areas of the city, but she would have liked to have some more interesting surroundings than rubbish and the rears of massive grey buildings.

Suddenly, she heard a crash, as though something had hit a dumpster. Looking up from the ground, since she'd been looking down to conceal her face from any casual observers, she ran down a nearby side-street in the direction of the crash, stuffing the hat in her pocket and shrugging off the coat to give herself more freedom of movement…

And stared in surprise at the sight in front of her.

It seemed to be a mass of people in leather coats wielding antique weapons as they lashed out constantly at a bunch of other people. Their opponents, distinguishable from the other side as being the ones who _weren't _armed, all seemed to be wearing some kind of elaborate Halloween masks as they punched and kicked out at the armed members.

Noting that both sides appeared evenly matched, and not having any particular interest in how things turned out, Elektra was about to move on when her eyes fell on a man holding a crossbow and some kind of… stake, for lack of a better term…

The man from the photograph.

Her target.

Elektra quickly went over her options. She could just take him out right now, but if things went bad and she took out one of the others, that wouldn't go down with her employers; they'd specifically stated that all targets had to be the only people that were killed on her 'missions'; anyone else in the area at the time was to be left alive no matter what.

Waiting for the fight to finish wasn't an option either; she couldn't guarantee she'd manage to track him down after this without somebody else spotting her and intervening; it would be harder to escape after she'd taken him down if there were other people anywhere near him when she killed him. Besides, if she eliminated him at the moment, it was unlikely that anyone would notice it; they'd probably assume that one of the other side had killed him while nobody was looking.

Nodding in resolve, Elektra ducked to the ground and rolled along the ground towards a nearby dumpster, located relatively close to the fight in question.

Looking up, she saw her target stabbing a sharp wooden stick through what seemed to be a dust cloud, but she dismissed it as just a fluke; the other gang must have been using some kind of incendiary to distract their foes, much like the ninjas that she'd read about when she was younger.

He was moving ever closer to her…

_Now_!

Quickly, Elektra jumped up and, before the target could notice what was happening to him, she had slit his throat with both of her daggers, then ducking back into the alleyway and running back towards the main street. As she ran, she grabbed the coat she'd left lying on the ground nearby and pulled it on as she ran, tugging the hat out of a pocket and shoving it onto her head.

By the time she'd reached the other end of the back street- this one linking up to one of L.A.'s main roads- Elektra's form-fitting outfit of blood-red leather was once again concealed by a long black leather coat, tightly buttoned up, while a wide-brimmed hat concealed her elegant brown hair. Fortunately for the ex-millionaire heiress, a cool wind was blowing that explained why she was so tightly wrapped-up, and the target had been neutralized so quickly that there was hardly any blood on her daggers to stain the coat.

Sighing as she stuck her hands in her pockets, Elektra could only hope that she wouldn't have that many more victims to eliminate before she reached the main target.

True, none of the people she'd had to take out so far could exactly be called 'losses' to society, but she was beginning to feel like a mouse running through wheels for the amusement of something that she couldn't see or understand…

She shook her head; she really had to stop getting distracted like that. True, after… what had happened to her… she had been assured that she had every right for her mind to lose its focus. After all, she had been… out… for a remarkably long period of time; it was only to be expected that her mind would have trouble getting used to being back when it had been 'gone' to somewhere that no person was meant to return from in the first place…

Elektra groaned; she _had _to stop thinking about all that and come up with a cheerier train of thought.

As she turned around another corner, Elektra smiled slightly as an at least _slightly _encouraging thought occurred to her.

If her 'client' had been telling the truth about the tasks- and they didn't want to add anything else to the 'list' of practice targets- then she only had one more victim to take out before the last practice had been and gone…

Then she'd take out the main target and be done.

And maybe _then _she'd be able to get rid of this annoyingly persistent feeling that she should be looking at this situation a bit more closely than she was at the present; she couldn't shake the feeling that there was some angle to this assignment that she should have paid more attention to…


	4. Set on Collision Course

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **_Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

Blind Justice

As Matt followed Wesley into the police morgue, he couldn't contain a brief wince as the scent of blood that assailed his nostrils. He'd become accustomed to it over the years, of course- it was hard to do anything else, given his rather vicious attitude back before his epiphany while fighting the Kingpin- but he still found it disturbing at times.

He barely even paid attention to Wesley's conversation with the police officers as he tried to convince the police to let the two of them examine the body; Wolfram & Hart evidently had more pull than the typical law firm, but it still didn't extend as far as would be useful in this case. They would only have a few moments to examine the body before they got to ask any questions to the policemen who'd found the corpse, and they would be unable to take copies of the files on the crime for further analysis at their leisure.

It was at times like this he regretted that Daredevil was more effective as an urban legend rather than an actual confirmed presence in the cities he protected. If he was able to actually _say _he was there, he might be able to develop some kind of working relationship with the police, much like Batman was meant to have with the Gotham police department, and thus get at the evidence lockers for information with greater ease.

But there was no point in wondering about what could be different if his other identity was definitively known to the public now; if nothing else, he'd only just arrived in Los Angeles, and would hardly have had enough time to develop that kind of reputation over here. He'd just have to make the most of what influence he had as a _lawyer_, rather than as a _vigilante_, and hope for the best while he tried to crack this case.

Eventually, after much effort, Wesley was able to get them inside the morgue, and guided Matt towards one of the bodies in question. As Matt neared the table that seemed to be the reason for Wesley's visit, he used the vibrations caused when his feet hit the metal floor to get a better idea of what size of corpse he was dealing with here; it wasn't an exact science- even his heightened senses had problems with stuff like this- but it gave him a decent enough mental picture. Judging by the size of the body under the sheet, the victim was probably young, only in its mid-teens at best, and the flat chest indicated that he was dealing with a young _male_ in this instance; even the most underdeveloped woman would have had _something_ on her chest.

The sheet covering the body limited Matt's mental picture of the corpse- the sheet blocked most of the sound waves made by Matt's feet as he walked, making it difficult for him to ascertain the means of death using his 'sonar sense'. However, the faint tang of blood, still fairly strong (To Matt's heightened senses) despite the fact that the victim must have been dead for some hours, coupled with the wide hole he could feel as he ran his right hand briefly over the body, suggested to Matt that the victim had been stabbed; a bullet couldn't have caused the prominently-sized wound in the victim's chest.

In the course of his examination, he also detected a faint trace of uneven stubble around the boy's face, suggesting that the boy was homeless with erratic access to a razor or means of shaving. It might almost have been taken for a simple street fight that turned ugly, were it not for the fact that the hole in the boy's chest was too large to have been caused by a simple knife.

"So, how did you know this guy?" Matt asked, turning to face Wesley's direction, deciding that he might as well attend to the obvious question straight away. "Personally, professionally, or just a casual acquaintance?"

"It's a mix of all three, really; he was the subject of a case that Angel and I investigated, back when we ran a private detective agency together," Wesley explained. "We formed a certain friendship with his family, but this boy was impossible to relate to. He was an extremely troubled teen; he… believed himself to be possessed by a demon, for some reason… and nearly burnt down his family's house, with his parents and sister still inside it, before Angel and I managed to get them both out."

"I see," Matt said, nodding briefly as he took in what was being said to him. The story all sounded plausible, certainly; he just couldn't ignore the detail that Wesley's heart had briefly accelerated as he described his history with the individual now lying before them. It wasn't much of a change from Wesley's normal heartbeat, he had to admit- the _majority _of the details in his story were probably all true, in that case- but there was enough of a difference for Matt to know that his new employer wasn't telling him the entire truth.

_The only question_, he thought to himself, as he heard the sound of a door opening behind him and Wesley, _is whether or not there's a _good _reason for him to be lying to be, or if he's got some other agenda I don't know about_.

Whatever the case, he was rapidly coming to a decision that he'd hoped he might have been able to leave behind him once he moved to a new city.

This night, Los Angeles would have a new face exploring the criminal underworld for further information…

* * *

"You sure sending the new guy off on this little jaunt is a good move?" Spike asked, staring inquiringly at Angel with a slightly teasing expression on his face as the original vampire with a soul tried to sort through some files on his desk.

Groaning, Angel put down the files and prepared for yet another argument with Spike. His one-time protégé may have become slightly more bearable to have around now that he'd gotten over his initial inability to touch anything- at least Spike was no longer bugging the others for every little thing- but that still didn't stop his annoying habit of just popping up out of nothing whenever he felt like it from being a complete pain in the neck.

"I thought that a fresh perspective on the situation might be beneficial, Spike," Angel said, looking critically up at his grandsire. "Matt not only offers that new perspective, but I thought that his heightened senses may be useful in helping Wesley come to some conclusions about what's going on here."

"Heightened _what_?" Spike said, looking at Angel in confusion. "What the hell are you on about, Peaches? The man's _blind_, remember; how can he contribute something when the bugger can't even _see_?"

"In my first year in L.A., I faced a woman called Vanessa Brewer who came close to killing me even though she couldn't see a thing," Angel replied, glaring critically at Spike; for a vampire with a soul who was no kind of 'ghost' that they could establish, he could be remarkably closed-minded at times. "She'd deliberately blinded herself when she was 21, and then she spent 5 years studying in Pajaur with a group called the Nan Jin. I later learned that she made up for her lack of sight by using her other senses to a degree that would normally be impossible even for you and me; she was meant to be able to sense people with her heart, but I think it was her other senses operating on a higher level. Subsequently, whenever I fought her, I learned to notice a few things about how she 'saw' without her eyes; a slight cocking of her head, raising her nose, that kind of thing. Matt tries to hide it, but trust me; all the signs show that, like it was with Vanessa, Matt's 'blindness' is an exaggerated handicap."

Spike shrugged dismissively. "Whatever; doesn't matter how good his senses are, he's still only human," he said casually.

"Humans can do remarkable things, Spike; haven't you noticed that over the last few years?" Angel asked, glancing back at the vampire/ghost/whatever. "Around half our team are totally human- nothing supernatural about the talents they possessed when they began working with me- and back in Sunnydale, Xander held his own despite having no powers at all. I would have thought you'd have learnt that we shouldn't underestimate people just because they don't have the abilities we do."

"Yeah, whatever; if you're concerned about him, want me to keep an eye on him when he gets back?" Angel's form unofficial protégé asked, looking inquiringly at his 'friend'. "I mean, no matter what his senses are, he can't pick me up, right? I don't even have a _body_ any more; what could he hear?"

"Unless you decide to change personality in the next few minutes, you'll just need to exist to give it away; knowing you, you'll say something to reveal your presence in his office after only a few moments," Angel stated briefly as he turned back to the files in front of him. "Now, if you don't mind, I've got…"

As he opened another file in front of him- this one near the top of the pile, but lying on the other files in a manner that suggested it had just been given to him earlier that morning as someone passed by his desk- he stopped what he was saying and groaned as he stared at the contents. "Aw crap."

"What?" Spike said, walking _through _Angel's desk to peer at the file in his grandsire's hands. He couldn't see what was so shocking about it; it just seemed to be a photo of some dark-skinned hairless guy dressed as though he was going down to the gym and carrying a large crossbow in one hand, slung up against his shoulder in a manner that you'd expect to see someone holding a gun.

"Something wrong?" Spike asked, looking curiously at Angel. "Who _is _that guy?"

"His name is- _was_, I suppose is the correct term now- Rondell, and he was a member of Gunn's old crew," Angel explained, as he glanced back at Spike. "We didn't exactly get on well- the last time we met the crew had gone on a mass anti-demon vendetta and were trying to kill me just because I was a vampire- but still…"

He shrugged slightly as he stared sympathetically at the photograph. "The guy fought the good fight- in spirit, at least; he and his team just had to work on some of the practical details- just like we do, and he didn't have any detailed occult knowledge to fall back on. You can't help but respect that, really."

"Yeah… I guess," Spike said, shrugging in an attempted dismissive manner as he looked at the files. "The guy got stabbed in the back in a vamp fight? What's up with that; even street vamps with no style'd normally just _bite _the bugger, unless I've suddenly lost my memory of what those guys can be like?"

"I know, it doesn't add up…" Angel muttered, as he stared at the file in confusion and pulled out another photo, this one showing Rondell's bare back with a gaping would in the back, beside the spine, around where the heart was. "And the _size _of the wound… I could understand a vampire gang using knives if they wanted to attract less attention, but a hole that size would take something larger than the kind of weaponry you'd normally be using in a street gang…"

He looked up at Spike, concern evident on his face. "There's something bigger going on here than a couple of random murders."

Normally, Spike would have made some smart comment about Angel becoming overly paranoid about the situation; after all, in their line of work, people they knew commonly ended up dead all the time.

But these deaths- these _murders_-, taking place in such a short space of time, with such similarities in methods of death- both victims having been stabbed with long daggers-, and both of them people who'd posed a _specific _threat to Angel, albeit in a different manner…

Spike had to agree with his grandsire; something _was _going on right now that they didn't know about. One well-executed death (No pun intended) of an old 'acquaintance' might be coincidence, but two suggested something more was going on…

_Which leaves us with the obvious questions, really_, Spike mused to himself, as Angel stood up and headed for the door of his office. _Who did it, why did they do it, and will it start to affect _us _sooner rather than later_?

However, before that train of thought could go any further, a phone rang on Angel's desk. Sighing in frustration, the vampire turned back to his desk and picked up the phone, bringing it to his ear with such force that Spike was briefly surprised he didn't break the damn thing.

"_Yes_?" Angel said, a slightly grating tone in his voice; the phone, Spike noted, was the one that was commonly called by that 'Eve' chick, so Angel's attitude probably didn't make a blind bit of difference right now.

A moment's pause, and then Angel said, "_What_?" in the exasperated tone that Spike had grown used to hearing from Angel whenever someone in Wolfram & Hart asked his sire to do something he fundamentally _didn't _want to do.

"I'm sorry, but providing _protection_ for a simple _business executive_?" Angel yelled down the phone, slamming his hand down onto his desk; if he'd hit it any harder, the desk would have broken. "What, did she tick off the wrong person when she took the job or something?"

He paused for a moment as he listened to her talk for a while longer, until, finally, he sighed and nodded.

"Look, when _is _this meeting going to be?" he asked, as he sat down in a nearby chair, clasping his forehead in frustration as he listened. There was a moment's pause, and then, finally, Angel nodded.

"OK, if it's then, I'll do it, but I'm taking Spike to act as back-up," he said finally. Putting down the phone, he glanced up at Spike. "Get down to the garage; we've got work to do."

"Doing what; running protection for some stupid executive?" Spike asked, looking curiously at his sire as the two of them headed for the door (Well, Angel headed for the door; Spike just walked through the wall beside it). "She a client of this place or something?"

"Apparently," Angel stated grimly, already checking through his coat pockets to make sure that he had his car keys; he'd relocated any of the firm's old drivers so that he could retain _some _independence from the corporation he'd been given for 'ending world peace'. It was a minor victory in his program to change Wolfram & Hart, he knew, but sometimes the minor ones- such as his recent hiring of Matt Murdock- were what really mattered. "Eve's got information that there's going to be an attempt on her life during a meeting with her publicity staff at about nine o'clock tonight, and she wants me to keep an eye on the situation."

As he walked towards the lift, Spike as ever walking _through _anything in his way, the former Scourge of Europe was already pulling out his mobile, dialling a number as he raised it to his ear.

"Wesley?" he said, as he and Spike stepped into the elevator, Spike pushing the button for the car park (Ever since learning how to touch he enjoyed the chance to do the little things that he'd missed when he had no real body). "Spike and I have to keep an eye on a business executive who's a client of ours; Eve's got reports of some assassination attempt being planned, and we've been asked to provide security in case things turn ugly. When you and Matt have what you need from the police, just get back here as soon as possible; I'd feel better if I knew you were keeping an eye on the situation back here."

After a moment's pause, Angel nodded briefly and terminated the call, just as the elevator doors opened onto the car park.

"So, how long have we got to get there?" Spike asked, tapping the place on his wrist where he would have worn a watch if he'd had one.

"We've got a few hours until the meeting starts, but, quite frankly, any excuse to get out of the office early is good enough for me," Angel replied simply, as he headed over to one of the nearer cars. "I've got to cool off before we have to be at the meeting, or I might just kill the woman _myself_…"

* * *

As she settled down into her customary meditation position, focusing her mental and physical energies for whatever task her 'employer' may come up with next, Elektra briefly allowed her mind to drift from the present to look back at the events that had led up to this.

She still wasn't sure how it had to come to this state of affairs. Life… death… resurrection… becoming a trained assassin for a secretive cult of assassins… and now this mission where she had to take out various 'practice' targets before actually going after the person her 'clients' had originally hired her to eliminate. True, it was hardly a _problem _for her- her targets so far had hardly been the kind of people anyone would really miss, and they'd struck her as being potentially dangerous to others if left alive.

Still… she couldn't help wondering what kind of person would come next on her list of 'practice' targets. So far the assassinations had been fairly low-market people- easy enough to eliminate them; nobody was particularly concerned about them- but who'd come next? Someone bigger? More difficult to eliminate? What?

Finally, the phone rang, and she picked it up where it was lying beside her on the ground.

"Yes?" she asked, cursing the short tone in her voice; it wasn't her employer's fault that the assassinations had to be arranged the way they were, after all.

If Elektra told herself that often enough, maybe she'd finally start to believe it, just like she'd forced herself to believe all the other crap she had to tell herself after her death just to cope with being back in the world once again…

"_Good to hear from you, Miss Natchios_," the now-familiar voice of her contact said on the other end of the line, as casual as ever. "_You'll be pleased to know that, if all goes well, you may have the chance to kill two birds with one stone- or, failing that, just have to kill one bird_."

"What's the target?" Elektra asked; she hated it when her employee made these annoyingly cryptic comments.

"_A senator for the government; she's having a meeting with her publicity department in her office- I'll give you more details on where to find her later_," the voice explained. "_However, I have reason to believe that the prime target will also be there; if that is the case, you are to disregard the senator and go after him alone_."

"Of course," Elektra said, nodding briefly, silently relieved that there was a chance she could just finish this job straight away; she wanted to just get _out _of Los Angeles before she attracted too much attention. "What does he look like?"

"_He'll be wearing a long black leather duster, black trousers, and a dark-coloured top of some kind- he's a rather monochrome person, really- and has short brown hair that sticks up_," the voice explained. "_He's tough; your best chance is to take him by surprise and hit him in the chest with something sharp before he can react. You'll need to move rapidly and quietly, however; his reflexes are _extremely _sharp_."

"I'll bare that in mind," Elektra replied, as she nodded briefly, already making mental calculations as to what else would be involved in hitting a target while keeping those limitations in mind.


	5. Urban Legends Meet

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).

Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.

AN: Sorry about the delay in this chapter; SERIOUS case of writer's block here that I don't think will be going away any time soon. I'll try and finish this, I promise, but I can't guarantee that I'll have the next chapter up any time soon

Blind Justice

"Well," Wesley said, as he and Matt stepped out of their car- Matt taking care to use his stick to check what was in front of him- and began to walk towards the lift to the main building, "that could have gone significantly better than it did."

"Yeah, I know; didn't really have much to give us, did they?" Matt sighed, as he reached out with one hand, waving his hand slightly to fake uncertainty as he made contact with the door and pushed it open. "There was nothing they had to tell us that couldn't have been acquired from the official reports on the incident, and there's definitely nothing they _weren't _telling us about the whole situation."

Wesley nodded. "I gathered that," he said, looking reassuringly at the blind lawyer as the two of them headed towards the elevator. "I'll just head up to the office and tell Gunn what we've discovered about the situation; do you want to come along?"

Matt thought about it for a moment, but then shook his head.

"No, you go ahead," he said, looking apologetically at Wesley. "I've got to check in with Foggy- you know, my old business partner back in New York- and see how he's handling the workload on his own. I promised I'd give him a hand with anything he felt he was having difficulty with, that sort of thing, and I'd just like to make sure that he doesn't need any advice or pointers."

"Fair enough," Wesley said, nodding in understanding as he stepped into the elevator. There was a momentary _Ding_ as he apparently pushed the elevator button, and then the doors had closed and Matt's new friend had vanished.

He waited for a moment, and then turned around and headed for the street.

He still wasn't entirely used to this new city- it would take a while before he had the in-depth familiarity with it that made him so effective back in New York- but, with a murderer on the loose, it was clear that he couldn't sit idly by and do nothing, particularly when, according to the phone-call Wesley had received, he _knew _where the killer was going to strike next.

He'd been hoping he wouldn't need to do this- if nothing else, it made it hard to keep up the 'urban legend' image if the legend moved cities- but, for the moment, he didn't have a choice.

With a killer on the loose in the city, it was time to take his costume out of his bags, head downtown to that office he'd heard Wesley talk about, and see if he could find some new information about whatever he was dealing with here, using the approach he _couldn't _use as Matt Murdock...

The hands-on approach.

* * *

Around an hour later, on the roof of an apartment complex a few blocks away from Wolfram & Hart, a tall figure clad in blood-red leather stood, 'staring' out at the city, two small clubs, each one joined to the other by a thin stretch of cable, clutched in his hands as, head lowered, he seemed to be studying his surroundings. Then he stepped back, threw one of the clubs over a slightly protruding water-pipe that he estimated to be strong enough to take his weight, and swung through the air, landing on a fire escape opposite in a manner that was relatively graceful, given his size and musculature.

As he landed, the man now known to all as Daredevil, known as Matt Murdock only when he _wasn't _wearing the red-horned mask, tilted his head to one side as he listened carefully to his surroundings. The lack of rain made it difficult for him to get a clear picture of his present location, but there was enough traffic and people in the streets to provide him with a decent mental picture of the streets anyway, no matter how difficult it was to get a clear 'look' with inconsistent sound like that.

Quickly going over the route he'd just received from his computer- he had _never _been more grateful for that voice-command system Foggy had persuaded him to install, he'd never have been able to find his way to his destination otherwise- Daredevil estimated that it would take him maybe forty minutes to reach the office where Angel was meant to be meeting that business executive. He'd made a call to the office, altering his voice slightly to avoid attracting questions, and, posing as a client of Angel's, had been able to convince Angel's secretary to give him the location where Angel was at present.

His new boss may look like he could handle himself in a fight, but, if the worst came to the worst, some extra help from a vigilante who'd tackled some of the worst scumbags in the New York area and lived to talk about it couldn't fail to be useful, in Matt's opinion.

Call him arrogant, maybe, but he was _certain _he could help out right now; if nothing else, who'd expect _Daredevil_, an urban legend- more, an urban legend from _New York_, a city on the other side of the _continent_- to show up to avert an assassination attempt in _Los Angeles_?

He could only hope he made it there in time; he'd had more than enough near-misses (By which he meant misses where he'd just been a _shade _too slow to get there in time) in his career to add _another _one to the list…

* * *

As he waited in the elevator of the office building that Eve had directed him to, Angel was already fuming about this new 'assignment' of his. He may not have even _met _the woman he was meant to be protecting yet, but, as far as he was concerned, if she was _willingly _connected with Wolfram & Hart- and, if she felt comfortable with the prospect of having him provide protection, she clearly knew _what _the firm was up to- she almost didn't deserve protection.

He absolutely _hated _this part of the job…

But, as Eve had said to him all those weeks ago, when the group had been forced to get that guy off in the courtroom or end up having a significant portion of Los Angeles destroyed by a virus (He still _hated _thinking about that bastard), he knew that he had no other choice.

If they were going to do any _good _with the firm, they had to keep some of the old clients satisfied as well, or else they wouldn't have the resources to get anything done.

As much as he wished he was able to do it otherwise, he had to help the bad guys now and again if he wanted to do _anything _about helping the innocent…

Regardless of his reasons for being there, no matter how annoying he might be at times, Angel was grateful that Spike was keeping an eye on things in the surrounding area; the vampiric 'ghost' had agreed to scout around the stairs to make sure nobody was trying to sneak up that way when they'd arrived. The vampire formerly known as William the Bloody wasn't exactly _ideal _back-up, true, but at least he had recently worked out how to _touch _things on his own once more; if push came to shove, Spike could shove back without getting attacked _himself_, even if it would only be the occasional strike.

As the lift finally reached its destination- just a couple of floors below the top one- the doors opened and Angel walked out of the elevator, grateful that he was done with that particular part of this 'meeting'; somehow, whenever he had to go into a lift on his own, he always had flashbacks to those brief moments when Angelus had woken up in his coffin. As a vampire, Angelus hadn't minded, but ever since he'd got his soul back, Angel had found those memories to be _very _disturbing.

Oddly enough, he never seemed to be reminded of his coffin when he was in company inside elevators; maybe the presence of other people helped his mind recognise that he _wasn't _going to have to dig his way to the surface once again…

Shrugging it off, Angel turned his attention back to the door, tapping his foot impatient on the ground as he watched the floor counter move ever closer to the floor that the senator was meant to be on. He just wanted to get there and get this over and done with…

Then Angel heard a faint noise off to the side, just as his foot stepped out of the door, and his eyes widened in shock.

No sooner had he stepped out of the hall, than he heard something hurtling through the air towards him from off to the side. Spinning around, Angel quickly raised his hands to grab the dagger that was flying through the air towards him, moving at a speed that made most of the crossbow bolts he'd caught in his time seem slow. It was only when he held it in his hands that he noticed that it was a sai dagger, of the kind he'd commonly seen in Japan, and that the woman who'd thrown it was standing at the end of the corridor looking at him in surprise; evidently, whoever had sent her to kill him hadn't told her about his enhanced physical abilities.

Taking advantage of the surprise, Angel took a moment to quickly scan the person he was looking at; a woman, in her early to mid-twenties, dressed in form-fitting black leather and with another dagger strapped to her waist. Long brown hair was tied back in a professional-looking ponytail, and a grim expression was on her face as she stared at the man who she'd come close to killing.

To her credit, despite the surprise on her face, she barely even blinked at Angel's quick response to her attempt to stab him; she just reached to her side, pulled out another dagger, and charged towards him. Almost instinctively, Angel raised the dagger he'd just acquired to defend himself, the two daggers meeting with a loud clang as they met in mid-air.

As soon as his opponent began to try and force the dagger she was holding towards him, Angel's eyes widened slightly in surprise as he noted the distinct _lack _of strength behind the dagger.

Despite his earlier talk to Spike about not underestimating what humans were capable of, he hadn't expected someone capable of coming _that _close to hitting him with a weapon to only have human-level strength (And presumably reflexes, now that Angel thought about it; enhanced reflexes were never a demon's sole weapon), no matter how much training the woman had evidently had with her chosen weapons.

Of course, that wasn't to say she wasn't a _challenge _for him; if Angel had learnt anything in the past few years, it was that humans weren't as little of a challenge as Angelus had once assumed, and this woman was clearly no exception. She definitely had a lot of experience when it came to fighting people hand-to-hand, but the surprise on her face as she strained against him made it clear that she hadn't been expecting him to be that physically powerful.

All he had to do was keep this up, get the dagger out of her hands, disarm her, find out who the _hell _had hired her for this job…

Then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in between his legs, and was sent staggering back, instinctive pain momentary overriding his fighting instincts. Before he could prepare himself to try and strike back again, his opponent had grabbed the dagger he was holding, had raised them both in an attack position, and was lashing out at him with a focused intensity that he hadn't seen in a human since he'd last seen Gunn's old gang in action.

(Which wasn't to say that Wes, Gunn and Fred weren't _good _fighters; they just didn't allow the fight to consume their lives to the extent that this woman seemed to have dedicated her own life to fighting).

Trying to shake off the sharp pain in between his legs, Angel tried to fend off her blows as the fight continued, but it was made increasingly difficult by his body's own desire to just fold over into the foetal position and cradle the pain between his legs.

God, after all he'd taken in past fights, it was almost _pathetic _that he couldn't entirely cope with the pain of just getting _kicked_…

_Make that _repeatedly_ kicked_, Angel thought, as he felt another kick strike him between his legs, before a roundhouse kick to his head sent him staggering back through a nearby door. He only just had time to note that he was in a conference room of some kind- it looked like he'd landed on the table- before he felt one of his opponent's sai daggers plunge directly into his chest, just grazing his heart.

If he'd been human, he'd be dead.

If the dagger had been a wooden stake, he'd be dead.

If it had been closer to his heart- directly in the centre- he'd be dead.

As the situation currently stood, as he lay in the middle of the table, the blade sticking out of his chest, he concluded that it might be for the best at the moment to just _pretend _to be dead, and take the situation from there. When the woman came in to pull the dagger out, he'd strike back, take her out as fast as possible, and then…

Well, he'd deal with whatever happened after that as it developed from there; he already had a few questions he was definitely going to need to ask her.

Given that he couldn't remember seeing her before in his life, the odds were good that she was just a hired assassin who'd been sent by somebody to take him out, but after taking control of Wolfram & Hart, he couldn't rule out the possibility that she was a client of the firm who wanted to stop him before he got to her.

All that was certain was that he'd only find out if he actually _asked _her the questions.

Sensing the woman start to move towards him, Angel tried to stop himself from blinking as he stared up at the ceiling. Based on the woman's position, she was going to check his neck for a pulse first, then she'd probably pull the dagger out before walking away.

It might be pushing his luck a bit- even for a vampire, this kind of injury wasn't an easy one to shrug off- but Angel would only attack once the dagger was out of his chest and she had his back to him. At that moment, she'd be least expecting an attack- if she was even _bothering _to check his pulse, she definitely didn't know about his vampiric nature- so all he'd need to do was stand up, knock her out, and get both of them out of here before anyone saw him.

As her fingers touched his neck, Angel tensed himself for the pain he'd feel as the dagger was yanked out of his chest, his eyes rolled up to add to the illusion of death…

Nothing happened.

Angel's eyes widened in surprise as the woman turned around and began to walk away, apparently content to leave the dagger behind.

So much of him facing assassins who developed bonds with their weapons or got concerned about evidence; it looked like this woman was perfectly happy to leave the dagger where it was.

In all fairness, there was no reason that Angel could think of for her to take it; from what he could see of the dagger, there weren't even any fingerprints on it. Besides, he could feel that it had been rammed pretty deeply into his chest; she probably felt that she wouldn't have the time to get it out before somebody managed to overhear something and investigate.

_Right then_… Angel thought to himself, as he heard his would-be killer walk off down the corridor, reaching up to grab the dagger impaled in his chest, trying to ignore the pain in his chest as he stretched his muscles around the dagger. _Time to get this thing out of me and find out what the _hell _is going on here_…

* * *

Had anyone been standing on the roof of the building at that moment, they would have been surprised to see a well-built figure dressed entirely in black leather crouched on the roof, apparently listening intently to something below him.

_Damnit_! the man commonly known as Matt Murdock thought to himself, as the sounds of fighting that had been waging below him stopped suddenly.

Given that he'd definitely heard someone using daggers below him- weapons that definitely _weren't _the kind of thing you used if you wanted someone to come out of a fight alive and well- it seemed like a safe bet that the fighting had only stopped because the person using the daggers had managed to do whatever they'd been sent there to do.

Despite all his efforts, he'd arrived too late to stop the murder.

But maybe, if he moved fast enough, he'd manage to catch the _killer_…

Jumping over the wall, Daredevil whipped out his billy club and launched one end onto the edge of the roof even as he fell. The cable between the two parts of the club instantly began to extend, lowering Daredevil rapidly down the side of the building even as he kept one hand on the end of the club he still held in his hand. Even as he strained his ears to make sure nobody could see him, he was straining his nose to make sure he didn't miss the level where the fight had taken place…

Then he smelt it.

_Blood_.

It was only a couple of floors below the roof, which at least explained why Matt had been able to hear it as clearly as he could, but there it was; behind the window just opposite him, Matt could smell fresh blood. There was something… off about it, he had to admit, but it was clear that somebody had just been badly wounded in there.

Pressing a control on his billy club to stop his descent, Matt nodded in a resolved manner.

_Here I come_… he thought, as he raised his legs to place his feet against the glass. Fortunately, the window didn't seem that thick; if he kicked back hard enough, he should get through the window in one go.

Bending his legs, he launched himself back from the window, both hands gripped around the billy club to ensure he didn't fall, and then thrust both legs forward, his thick leather boots aiming from the glass in front of him…

* * *

Angel had only just got back onto his feet, the dagger that had so recently been in his chest now held in one hand, when the window off to one side shattered and something that could only be a demon came crashing through the glass, landing on its feet as it glared in Angel's direction.

_Wait a minute…_ Angel thought to himself, as his enhanced vampire vision took in the sight before him; the lights in the room were off and his would-be killer had closed the door behind her, so he hadn't been able to see the new arrival clearly at first. However, now that he was actually taking the time to look, it was clear that the figure in front of him _wasn't _a demon, but was actually a human in what looked like thick red leather with a demonic 'mask' covering most of its head.

_Great_, Angel thought to himself. _A demon _wannabe.

As if that cult of kids who'd wanted to become vampires back in Sunnydale hadn't been bad enough, now he had people dressing up as _demons_?

_Well_, Angel thought to himself, nothing the new arrival's tensed shoulders and fixed glare as he raised his stolen dagger in one hand, _since he clearly wants a fight, I might as well give him one_.


	6. Removing Masks

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).

Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.

AN: Once again, sorry about the delay; the writer's block for this is an absolute _killer _to get through, quite frankly, and the only thing keeping me from just abandoning this is that I both have a half- decent plan for what I want to happen in the end and the fact that I _hate _doing that kind of thing

Justice is Blind

As soon as Matt had landed in the room, he instantly registered two things about the situation before him; firstly, that the man standing in front of him didn't seem to have a pulse- although it could have been that the heavy amount of breathing he was doing was somehow drowning out the less-clear sound of his heartbeat- and that he was holding a blood-stained dagger in his right hand, with blood apparently also covering his chest judging by the smell. For a moment, Matt wondered about the fact that the blood smelled surprisingly stale- almost like it came from someone who'd been dead for a while rather than a living person- but pushed it to the side, forcing his mind back on the more important issues of the present; surviving this encounter to put a killer away.

"I know a hundred ways to make you regret this," he said, his sightless eyes fixed intently on the figure before him. "Pick a number."

"Not that interested," the other man replied, his voice a low tone that Matt thought he recognised even if he couldn't be sure (The relatively silence in the room around him prevented him from forming a clear picture of his opponent's face, and the voice was already slightly distorted from the evident pain of his wound). "Actually, I'm more interested in taking _you _out."

With that, the man leapt towards him with a speed that Matt hadn't encountered since his last fight with Bullseye, Daredevil only just managing to duck to the side and knock him off-balance by hitting him in the side of the head with his club, following the attack up by kicking his foe in the side while he was still in the air. The attack didn't seem to do much to his opponent- the man was back on his feet with such a rapid speed that Matt wasn't even sure he'd paused for breath-, but it was enough to give Matt time to assume a combat stance and fix his focus on his enemy.

No matter what this man was capable of, Matt _could _defeat him, he was sure of that; the trick was to do it as quickly as possible so he didn't have time to effectively strike back...

* * *

Off to one side, on a building rooftop several stories above the combatant's current location, a lone figure dressed in black leather stared silently at the deadly dance now taking place before her.

In one regard, she was almost disappointed that she wouldn't have the chance to deal with this new opponent herself- he looked like he'd make a _very _interesting challenge; his speed and reflexes alone seemed to be almost as fast as hers-, but at least this way she got a chance to better observe her mysterious target in action. The fact that he'd survived a blow like the one she'd given him made it obvious to even a casual observer that he wasn't as human as she'd believed he was originally, which made it all the more imperative that she learn what he was before she tried going after him again.

_How _her target was still alive was a prominent question, of course, but given that she herself was still alive after what, according to everyone she'd spoken to, had actually _been _a fatal wound, she supposed it wasn't exactly out of the question for her to encounter someone else who could come back from that kind of damage without the rituals that had been used on her...

Pushing those questions aside, the fighter settled down to silently observe the confrontation taking place before her, mentally taking notes on the combat styles of both parties in the fight as she prepared for the moment when she would face one of them again (She had a feeling that her employers would be _very _interested in someone capable of taking out her target if the man in red won, and she'd still need to go after her target if he lost; there were no circumstances that she could see at this time which _wouldn't _result in her fighting at least one of these people again).

* * *

Angel had to hand it to the guy he was up against; the man may only have human-level strength- or at least the kind of strength a human would possess after putting in some _serious _training; the guy definitely knew what he was doing in a fight-, but his reflexes were sharper than anything he'd encountered before; he was moving at a rate that was almost Slayer-like, despite being evidently male and far older than most Slayers. The leather outfit he was wearing might have slowed him down, but if it was he certainly didn't give the impression that it was a significant handicap; probably he figured the extra resistance it gave him to physical attacks made up for it...

Whatever the reason he wore the outfit, Angel wouldn't allow it to affect his judgement; he might look demonic, but he was still a human with human weaknesses, which gave Angel the advantage in a straight fight. Allowing himself to take a couple of punches to the ribs, Angel let his opponent feel confident enough to lower his guard before following the attack up with a powerful uppercut, the force of the resulting blow slightly dislodging the mask he was wearing.

For a moment, the sight and scent of blood on his opponent's lip made Angel's eyes widen- given how little he knew about what was happening here, he hadn't wanted to unleash _too _much power against his opponent in case he did something permanent-, but then the other man wheeled around and struck him with a stick of some sort that he had in one hand before Angel could properly register what was happening, the vampire reacting on instinct to launch another powerful punch at the other man's chest. Reeling backwards once again from the force of the blow, the other man barely had time to register that his mask had become dislodged from his head before Angel had punched him in the face once again, the impact dislodging the other man's mask and sending him tumbling backwards to the floor.

Leaping forward, Angel stood over the man he'd just been fighting, his fist raised for another powerful attack, only to halt as soon as he saw the face of the man he'd just been fighting.

He'd known that Matt Murdock's blindness wasn't as significant a handicap as it might have appeared to be at first, but he definitely hadn't been expecting it to be to _this _extent...

* * *

For a moment, as Elektra studied the sight before her, her eyes narrowed as she tried to focus on the now-unmasked red figure; it might be her imagination, but she distinctly thought that she _recognised _that face-

_STOP_!

No, she couldn't stop, the thought wouldn't just go away like that; she _knew _that-

_STOP_!

It was dangerous to probe her past, she knew that- certain memories had been suppressed by those who brought her back for her own _good_-, but if she could just see that face-

_**STOP!**_

Shaking her head dismissively as the sudden pounding pain she was feeling began to dissipate, Elektra shrugged and turned around, heading back towards her apartment.

Judging by the way in which her target had stopped fighting the man in red, she thought it was fairly obvious that the two of them wouldn't be helping her to complete her assignment any time soon, which meant that the only way she was going to deal with this situation now was to try and get some more information from her employers before she tried again.

Specifically, once she'd established how the _hell _her target managed to survive getting stabbed in the chest like that, she might be able to determine a way of figuring out what _would _kill him...

* * *

"_Matt_?" Angel yelled, staring in shock at the dazed figure lying before him, the former New York lawyer clutching at the bleeding cut on his head as he 'looked' up at his boss (As much as someone could be said to be 'looking' at somebody when they were blind).

"A… Angel?" Matt gasped, his confusion clear in his voice as he tried to stagger back to his feet only to slump back onto the ground; evidently, even through the leather, Angel's punches had really taken the wind out of him. "Wh… what…?"

"Look, I'll answer any questions you have later; right now, we need to get back to Wolfram & Hart and go over what just happened here," Angel interjected, crouching down to help his new friend back onto his feet, mentally cursing how much damage he'd unleashed on Matt before he realised who he was dealing with.

He _really _needed to learn not to make such hasty decisions these days; every time he'd acted in hast since getting his soul back it had invariably backfired on him, whether directly or indirectly.

Right now, the best he could do was hope that Matt understood that he hadn't intended any malice when he'd originally attacked him- after establishing what a lawyer was _doing _going around dressed like that, of course-, and take it from there.

Given that he strongly doubted Matt was involved in the murders- they knew for a fact that he'd been on his way over to Los Angeles from New York at the time of the first murder, and the odds of him precisely duplicating the style of another murderer without access to any records of the other murder were astronomical-, this not only left him with the question of the mystery of the identity of the woman who'd stabbed him earlier, but meant that he now had to deal with the fact that his new recruit wasn't as normal as he'd assumed...

"What the bloody hell's going _on _in there?" Spike asked as he opened the door to the office, staring at Angel in frustration. "The second you go in there, some kind of bloody wards stop me even getting _into _the damn room, and then I've got to wait outside while-"

His eyes widened at the sight of the other man that Angel was carrying. "Hold on, is that-?"

"Matt Murdock, yeah," Angel said, nodding in confirmation at his 'grand-childe'. "He interrupted me just after I was attacked by a person I assume was our assailant; we had a bit of an... altercation before I figured out who he was."

"Oh," Spike said, allowing himself a brief smile before he became more serious as he studied the dazed lawyer. "Interesting costume, though."

"Thanks..." Matt muttered, 'looking' up for a moment before he assumed a more confused expression. "Uh... are you... not solid... or something?"

"Pardon?" Spike asked, blinking in surprise at the suddenly random statement.

"I get the impression... you aren't... 'all there'... shall we say?" Matt elaborated, a slight smile on his face as he, Angel and Spike continued to walk towards the streets, Matt regaining some degree of strength to allow him to walk on his own as they progressed. "What... happened... to you?"

"Long, weird, and not-relevant-at-this-time story," Spike said briefly. "Let's just say something strange happened to me and leave it at that, OK?"

Angel hated leaving Matt hanging like this, but he had to acknowledge that what they were dealing with right now meant that further conversation wasn't exactly practical; with an unknown killer with unknown motivations hanging around somewhere, their best chance to _ever _continue anything was to get back to the at-least-secure buildings of Wolfram & Hart and hope that they could keep things together long enough to explain each other's sides of the current story...


	7. Matt's Story

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).

Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.

Justice is Blind

Looking back, Wesley was never entirely certain what he'd expected when Angel called with reports that he needed a private medical area set up at Wolfram & Hart so that they could examine someone he'd attacked without anyone else at the firm knowing about it.

Setting up the requested private room hadn't been too difficult, of course- particularly not when all of the group had picked up a varying knowledge of medicine after the various times they'd been treated in hospitals; they weren't expert doctors, but they should be able to deal with some of whatever injuries had been sustained when Angel brought the patient in-, but he was definitely curious to learn why Angel had requested they set this up in the first place. Angel's own supernatural healing ruled out the possibility that it was him, but he would hardly have bothered to bring a Wolfram & Hart client here- just because he had to provide them with legal support didn't mean he had to give them medical assistance as well-, and no matter how concerned Angel would always be about the man on the street he still wouldn't bring anyone here if they'd just been injured in the crossfire unless he was certain he had to...

Then Spike walked through the doors of the medical wing- literally _through _them, of course; even after he'd mastered the ability to touch things again he still seemed to be enjoying the other benefits of his new powers-, closely followed by Angel half-carrying a man dressed in red leather, whose face was instantly recognised by the rest of the former Angel Investigations team.

"_Murdock_?" Gunn said, staring incredulously at the blind lawyer. "What the hell are you doing in _that _get-up?"

"It's a long story, Gunn; right now, our main priority is making sure Matt's going to be able to tell it to us later," Angel said, shooting a brief glare at his friend before he laid the leather-clad lawyer on the medical bed that had been set up for him.

"What happened to him, anyway?" Wesley asked, looking curiously at the clearly-battered Matt Murdock as he lay before them, his Watcher's mind already checking over Matt's form for any obvious 'danger' signs that they should treat before anything else.

"Well... I... _kind of_... got into a fight with him," Angel said, raising his hands defensively as the group turned to glare at him. "Hey, c'mon, I'm investigating a murder and a guy dressed like a devil shows up; what am I _supposed _to think?"

"Sorry... 'bout that... by the way..." Matt muttered, his weakened voice drawing the group's attention back to him as he weakly sat up, wincing as he clutched his chest in a manner that suggested that Angel had injured his ribs. "Thought... the same thing... when I saw you..."

"Well, we both had our reasons; let's just leave it at that and move on, huh?" Angel said with a reassuring smile, before a thought occurred to him as he reached into his pocket to pull out a dagger in a design that Wesley recognised as a sai even before Angel passed it over to him. "On that topic, if you could take a look at that I'd appreciate it, Wes; I think our killer tried to stab me with it."

"Uh... pardon?" Fred asked, looking at Angel uncertainly. "Do you mean, you think the killer tried to stab you but they may have been trying to do something else, or you think that the person who stabbed you was our killer but you don't actually _know _they were...?"

"The second one," Angel clarified. "They were in the right place at the right time, but that could just be a coincidence; the kind of people we're dealing with here _do _have enemies.

"Right..." Fred said, nodding thoughtfully as she studied the dagger. "Human?"

"As far as I could tell," Angel replied.

"OK then," Fred said with a nod as she turned her attention back to the dagger, an expression of simple contemplation on her face as she turned over her options in her mind.

"So," Gunn said at last, breaking the temporary silence as he looked over at Matt Murdock, "since it's looking like we've both got stuff that we didn't know about each other, and your story'll probably be a bit simpler than ours, I've just got one question right now; no offence, but how'd a blind dude get to be good enough at fighting that he managed to do anything to Angel?"

"He's good?" Matt asked.

"Seen him take on a bad guy bigger and tougher than him and walk away from it," Gunn confirmed (Admittedly, that was because the Beast had _thrown _Angel away rather than Angel beating his opponent, but Gunn didn't think there was much point in clarifying that issue; besides, even if Angelus had been the one in control when the Beast had been killed, he was still using Angel's body and experience to win). "So, how'd you do it?"

"More to the point, how did you do that without your vision?" Wesley asked, shooting a brief apprehensive glance at Angel- the memory of Vanessa Brewer wasn't something either of them were likely to forget- even as the majority of his attention remained focused on Matt. "I mean... well, without meaning to be rude, with your handicap..."

"Answering that goes back to when I lost my sight when I was twelve years old," Matt replied, turning his head slightly to face Wesley as he spoke, his blank gaze somehow surprisingly effective at focusing on the other man despite the fact that he couldn't use the eyes in question. "I was taking a shortcut home from school through an industrial site, and... well, to cut a long story short I got hit in the eyes by some radioactive waste when I wasn't paying attention to where I was going and the truck that was carrying it took a corner too sharply."

"_Ouch_..." Gunn muttered, shaking his head as he looked at Matt sympathetically. "Sorry about that, man."

"Thanks," Matt said, before he smiled slightly. "Funny thing was, it actually turned to be fairly good for me in the end; I'm not sure if it was the radiation in the toxic waste that hit me, or if it was just a fluke, but without my sight my other senses reached a point where they're so sharp I've... well, my hearing acts as a 'radar', is the best description I can give you; I 'see' most clearly when it's raining because I hear the sound the raindrops when they hit a surface for the first time, I can figure out when a person's lying based on their heartbeat..."

"And you never noticed that Peaches over here doesn't have one?" Spike put in, looking critically at Matt. "Not much for hearing then, are you?"

"It's not like I register _everything _I'm hearing... Spike, was it?" Matt countered, turning his head slightly to look in the direction of Spike's voice. "I mean, do you notice everything you're seeing when you're in a busy area, particularly when you're not actually _expecting _to see something that is or isn't there?"

"In other words, you never noticed that Angel didn't have a heartbeat because there was no reason for you to focus on his heart, right?" Fred asked, looking up from her analysis of the dagger.

"Pretty much, yeah," Matt nodded, wincing slightly as he felt a brief pain in his head as he did so before he continued talking. "I mean, I noticed there was _something _up with his heart when I didn't hear it even when we were in the same room, but I didn't think that much about it. He seemed honest enough, and it didn't seem worth making a big deal over something that didn't seem to have any bearing on who he was; I told myself he probably had a... thick shirt or a low heartbeat or something and decided not to worry about it."

"Thanks," Angel said, nodding briefly at Matt with a slight smile; even if the other man couldn't see it, the thought was what counted at times like this. "I appreciate that."

"So, our... unique medical history aside, how'd you go from getting enhanced senses to... well, to this?" Spike asked, looking uncertainly at Matt. "What, being a lawyer wasn't hard enough, so you went into the vigilante gig as well?"

"Felt like the best way to get things done," Matt replied, sitting up slightly as he began to get a closer look at his body, placing fingers on his injuries to better determine the extent of the damage; so far nothing seemed broken, but that could turn out differently with a closer look. "The idea was that I'd work to help the innocent when I was Matt Murdock- most of my cases back home focused on defending the innocent of crimes where they wouldn't be able to get justice normally because they can't afford good lawyers-, and go out as Daredevil to... deal with the situations where the law didn't work, although I've been working on my original way of doing things after... recent cases."

"Interesting stratagem, if nothing else," Wesley said, nodding slightly at Matt. "From that, I'll assume that you decided to investigate the recent murders on your own simply... well, 'because'?"

"Pretty much," Matt confirmed with his own nod, before he turned his attention to Angel. "Wasn't expecting what I got, though; there I was thinking that I was the only guy in a law firm who used... other methods... of getting things done, and then I ran into you."

"Well, we really just... 'inherited' the firm a few months ago," Angel explained. "We were at odds with the original owners of the firm for a few years beforehand- I ran a detective agency that derailed more than a few of their more... questionable schemes-, but then their head office basically 'waved the white flag' and gave us control of this entire division."

"They were trying for a 'power corrupts' thing- you know, give us all this authority and control, along with the freedom to use it however we want, while simultaneously forcing us to at least _partly _continue what they were doing originally or we don't retain the resources that they possessed back when they were working against us," Gunn clarified with a slight shrug. "Risky, we know, but we think it's been working OK so far, although that's one reason we gave you the job offer; trying to give ourselves lawyers with a better rep than the usual kind this place hired."

"Ah," Matt said, wincing slightly as he sat up even as he smiled over in the direction of Gunn's voice. "Well... glad to know you have such faith in me."

"Like you said, you stuck up for the guys who couldn't afford fancy legal help; we admired that about you," Gunn said.

"On the topic of 'faith'," Matt said, turning to face Angel, "as much as I appreciate you being this frank about everything, is there any chance that you being this honest about your pasts means you're going to explain what's so 'different' about you?"


	8. Reflections of the Blind

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **_Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:_  
_Elektra being behind all the murders._  
_Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly._  
_Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel._  
_Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy._  
_Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

Justice is Blind

As he exchanged an awkward glance with his friends, Angel was grateful to see that he wasn't the only one uncomfortable about what he was about to say; Matt might seem trustworthy, but that didn't mean that they should feel comfortable about telling him something that would almost automatically turn his entire life and the world as he knew it upside-down.

On the other hand, given that Matt was already clearly _not _a normal lawyer himself even before he came to Wolfram & Hart, they would probably have been obligated to tell him about this kind of thing anyway; the only thing that had changed was that they were telling him about it a bit sooner than they might have chosen to do so if this incident hadn't happened.

"Well..." Angel began, crossing his fingers in his pocket as he looked at Matt, hoping the other man wouldn't react too badly to the upcoming news. "Basically, I'm a vampire."

"Huh?" Matt said, 'looking' in Angel's direction in surprise.

"A vampire," Wesley repeated. "The reason you can't hear his heartbeat is that he doesn't have one, since his body's been dead for over two centuries; he spent the first hundred and fifty or so years as nothing more than a conventional vampire, but about a century ago he was cursed with his soul and thus regained his conscience, giving him the ability to once again distinguish right from wrong and therefore the ability to choose to do good rather than just keep killing like the rest of his kind."

"Oh," Matt said, a thoughtful expression on his face as he took in the information he'd just been given, before he finally shrugged in acceptance. "Well, that makes sense."

The people around him could only blink in surprise.

"That's it?" Fred asked, looking at Matt in surprise. "I mean, not that we're not grateful you're not calling us crazy, but if you didn't know about any of this before now...?"

"I was raised Catholic, and I still try and take it relatively seriously," Matt clarified. "Went to confession a bit more than the usual guy back when I was starting out as Daredevil, and I still try and drop in every week or so even after I've... thought things over."

"Thought things over?" Gunn asked.

"Let's just say I used... questionable force... back when I started out and leave it at that," Matt replied with a grim tone that made it clear he wasn't going to elaborate on that issue (Not that Angel particularly wanted to; the idea of a human using 'questionable force' in Matt's secondary line of work raised more questions than he liked right now). "The point is, I might not have always taken the rules of the church as seriously as I could have, but I still believed in it enough to feel that there were some things out there beyond what we could see; getting confirmation like this might be... a surprise, but I still had some ideas that there was something there."

"Ah," Angel said, nodding in understanding at Matt's explanation. "So... you don't mind?"

"Well, you haven't tried to kill me or anyone I know yet; I'd consider that a point in your favour," Matt said with a slight smile. "Besides, at least that explains why you were able to hold your own against me like that; I haven't taken a beating like that since the last time I fought the Kingpin."

"Kingpin?" Gunn said, looking at Matt in surprise, "As in, Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime?"

"The who?" Lorne asked.

"Major crime boss back in New York a year or so back; I read up on his history back when we started work here," Gunn explained. "He controlled most of the crime in the city before he was taken out; there was a few rumours that this masked vigilante Daredevil had been... involved..."

His voice trailed off as he looked at Matt, the implications of his costume hitting them for the first time.

"_You're _Daredevil?" he said, looking at the Hell's Kitchen resident in surprise.

"Costume didn't give it away?" Matt retorted with a slight smile.

"Well... OK, maybe it was a _slight _clue, but dude, you took out a whole _bar _without being able to see a _thing_?" Gunn asked, his face splitting into a slightly incredulous grin as he looked at the lawyer before him. "How the _Hell'd _you pick up moves like that?"

"Practise, improvisation, and what I picked up from what my opponents tried to use against me," Matt replied. "Amazing what you can pick up when your senses and reflexes are operating as quickly as mine are; whether it was the radiation in the waste that hit me or just some luck of the draw, I ended up with a radar-like sense of sound and a sense of touch that gives me an acute awareness of my surroundings, basically allowing me to use the sounds around me like a bat uses its ears to hear."

"And you didn't go for a 'bat' motif?" Gunn asked with a slight smile.

"The cape I'd have needed to create the impression of wings would cloud my senses; it's hard for me just to fight in a team because I can't tell who's who in a fight, the last thing I want is something that makes it even _harder _to hear what's happening around me," Matt said with a shrug.

"Point," Angel said with a brief nod. "And you started investigating the murder because...?"

"Well, actually I was just following you at the time and made a mistake; what we knew suggested that you were going to be the assassin's main target, and when I 'saw' something holding a weapon I pretty much went into action automatically," Matt said, looking apologetically in Angel's general direction. "Sorry about that."

"Hey, no problem," Angel said with a conciliatory nod. "After all, you're tracking a killer and dealing with a guy who you only know as the head of a law firm; I can't exactly complain about you fighting when you didn't know anything else about the situation."

"You were holding a weapon?" Wesley said, looking at Angel in surprise. "I thought you went out there unarmed?"

"I did," Angel replied, shrugging slightly as he indicated the weapon that Fred was studying. "The weapon was one that was used against me; the blow itself was very decisive- evidently whoever we're dealing with was given the job to kill me; you don't stab as firmly as that when you're just eliminating a witness-, but since they just left after _almost _stabbing me in the heart, they apparently didn't know what they were dealing with."

"Why?" Matt asked.

"When you kill a vamp, they turn directly into dust," Gunn clarified. "On the bright side, so long as you know what you're dealing with, it makes it hard for them to _pretend _that you killed them, while what Angel just said pretty much demonstrates why it's hard to kil them if you _don't _know what you're up against."

"Right..." Matt said, smiling slightly at Gunn's assessment of the situation before he turned to Fred. "Can I... hold that weapon, please?"

"Uh... sure," Fred said, nodding in acknowledgement of the blind man's request as she placed the sai in Matt's outstretched hand.

* * *

As Matt felt the dagger in his hands- a dagger that he had never 'seen' as clearly as he might have done, but the brief impression that he had been able to get of it would almost certainly haunt his memory forever-, his blood ran cold at the confirmation of what had only been a vague theory; his initial assessment of the weapon hadn't been clear enough given the rapid pace of the subsequent fight with Angel, but he'd seen enough to form the basics of his original idea even before he received this confirmation.

"Elektra's sai..." he whispered, his now-ungloved hand running over the weapon in shock as he took in what his fingers were telling him.

The image was sharper and clearer than anything he'd been able to pick up when he found himself fighting her during those dark moments before her death- he'd been more focused on avoiding her attacks than figuring out what she was actually using to attack him-, but that wasn't important right now.

What _was _important was that, based on the scent he could detect on these daggers- their contact with Angel had left the original scent somewhat weakened, but it _was _still there if you concentrated-, this weapon had _definitely _been held by the woman he loved; time and distance couldn't erase _that _scent from his nostrils...

"Elektra?" Angel asked, looking at his new lawyer in surprise. "You know whose weapon that is?"

"Yeah," Matt said simply (For a moment, he thought about lying about his connection to Elektra, but pushed that thought out of the way; it would only make things more difficult later if he lied now and Angel found out the truth later). "I... I think I knew the woman who used this."

"Hold on; how do you-?" Fred asked.

"I recognise her scent on this dagger," Matt clarified, spinning the blade around in his hand so that he could pass it back to Wesley. "Been a while since I smelt it, but that doesn't change the facts; it wouldn't be a lie to say that I know that scent pretty much as well, if not better, than I know my own."

"From your expression, I take it that there's something about the woman in question that we should know about?" Wesley asked.

"She died over a year ago," Matt said solemnly.

"Oh," Wesley said awkwardly.

"How did it happen?" Angel asked.

"She was stabbed by an assassin during a fight," Matt clarified, his tone solemn; the topic was difficult, but his new associates wouldn't have brought this issue up unless they needed answers. "I held her when her heart stopped beating... I _felt _the moment when she stopped breathing... and I couldn't do anything but run as the police showed up..."

"Hold on; the police showed up?" Gunn asked, looking at Matt with a sudden intensity. "As in, they found her body _just _after she died? As in, it's possible that-"

"NO!" Matt yelled, sitting up sharply in his bed, 'glaring' at Gunn as much as a man who couldn't see could glare at anyone. "That's _not _possible; she's _dead_! I don't know _what _kind of sick... _trick _this is, but-"

"Matt," Angel said, placing a firm hand on the other man's shoulder as he addressed the vigilante/lawyer, "as much as I appreciate that this is a... difficult... topic for you to discuss, we can't dismiss something as a theory just because you _say _it's impossible; if you recognise the scent-"

"_She wouldn't _DO _this_!" Matt yelled, reaching out to grab Angel's shirt before he sat back, wincing in pain as he processed the sudden pain in his arm and chest from where he'd taken his earlier beating from Angel.

"Sorry..." he said, wincing slightly at the pain in his arm. "But it _can't _be her... Elektra wouldn't _do _this..."

"If you say she wouldn't do this, I'll believe you, but we can't discount the possibility that she's being influenced by something else, even if it _is _her and not... well, the thing about magic is that it offers a lot of options beyond the obvious ideas," Angel said, looking grimly at the lawyer. "If you think you have an idea- even if it turns out to be the wrong one-, we have to at least _try _to follow it up if we want to find who this assassin is or who they're working for."

A part of Matt almost wanted to deny it more than he wanted to consider the idea that Angel was suggesting; the thought that Elektra, the most passionate woman he'd ever met, could have reached a point where she was killing people for no apparent reason...

But, on the other hand, there _was _still the mystery of that necklace he'd found on the rooftop after Elektra's death.

No matter how he might try to rationalise it away, Elektra wouldn't have had the chance, motive, or opportunity to leave that necklace up on the roof _before _her father was killed, and her attitude after the funeral made it fairly clear that she wasn't interested in anything that wasn't directly related to getting revenge for her father's murder; the only way that necklace could have ended up there was if someone put it there _after _the fight with Bullseye.

_Why _she'd left it rather than just _telling _him that she was alive was another matter, but that didn't mean he could discount the possibility just because he didn't like it.

If there was _any _chance that his new colleagues- his new _friends_- could help him get Elektra back, he had to try it...


	9. Speculations

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).

Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.

Justice is Blind

"So, in a nutshell, you think we're dealing with your dead billionaire martial artist ex-girlfriend who was somehow brought back to life after some psycho assassin with perfect aim stabbed her through the hart with her own dagger?" Gunn asked, looking slightly sceptically at the blind lawyer. "Bit of a stretch, isn't it?"

"I didn't say I had all the answers, Charles," Matt retorted, looking grimly back at the other lawyer. "I just said that I had an idea; this kind of thing isn't my area of expertise, but I'm _trying _to contribute here."

"As long as we're discussing that kind of topic..." Wesley said, tapping his chin thoughtfully as he looked at Matt. "Exactly how skilled _was_... Elektra?"

"She'd been training with a different sensei every year since she was five years old; Bullseye's main advantage against her was the fact that he relied more on long-range attacks without giving her time to use her close-quarter skills," Matt clarified.

"I see..." Wesley said, nodding thoughtfully at this latest news as he turned over their new ally's advice in his mind. "Well, there are certainly _some _groups out there that would find that kind of skill useful enough to bring her back, but the question is if they would be capable of it; resurrection spells are complicated at the best of times..."

"But they're _possible_, right?" Matt asked, a new expression of earnest inquiry on his face as he took in Wesley's last comment.

"...Maybe," Wesley admitted after a brief pause, looking awkwardly at the leather-clad lawyer. "There are actually a relatively wide variety of methods to bring someone back to life, but they all depend on a variety of factors; an attempt to resurrect someone we knew a couple of years ago was only successful because the person casting the spell was a particularly powerful witch, but the main reason for the difficulty was the length of time that the person they were trying to bring back to life had been dead, along with the difficult nature of the ritual itself..."

"There's other rituals for that kinda thing?" Gunn asked, looking at Wesley in surprise. "Always got the impression from what I picked up about Angel's ex that what Willow did was a bit trickier than that..."

"Well, most of the other methods of bringing people back after death involve very particular rituals that not many people outside the organisations known for them are even aware of- even the Council only knows about them from rumour rather than officially documented evidence-, and even then they would have required someone to have had access to the deceased within a certain time frame after their demise; even if Willow knew about these methods, the time it would have taken her to learn how to carry them out would probably have rendered it impractical for her to use them on Buffy..." Wesley clarified, before he shook his head in frustration at himself and turned his attention back to Matt. "The point is, there are _some _cults that might have access to the rituals required to resurrect Elektra if they had the chance to gain access to her body before she had been dead for _too _long, and what you've told me about her fighting skills definitely suggest that there are one or warrior groups out there that might find her worth their attention, but there's still too many variables for me to determine who and why they'd do something like that..."

"But it's _possible_?" Matt said, 'staring' as intently at Wesley as a blind man could.

"It's... not _im_possible," Wesley said with an awkward nod.

"Look, if you're thinking of helping us on this-" Angel began.

"There's no 'if' about it, Angel," Matt countered firmly. "If Elektra's involved, give me a couple of nights to get over the worst of the damage, and I'm _going _to help you."

"I'm not arguing with that," Angel said, nodding in understanding at Matt before his voice became more resolute. "But if you're getting involved in this, I want to make something clear; whatever you can do on your own merits, it doesn't change the fact that you're not used to dealing with stuff like what we face on a regular basis. If we get into a situation, you need to at least _listen_ to whatever I have to say to you before you start doing anything; if you go in without advanced knowledge of the situation there's a chance that you could make a mistake or do something that would just make things worse."

"Of course," Matt said, nodding slightly at Angel, only a slight trace of uncertainty in the nod that Angel dismissed as perfectly understandable given his apparently usual 'lone wolf' attitude towards his vigilante 'career'.

"Right," Gunn said, smiling as he looked at the others. "So, let's-"

Whatever Gunn was about to say was cut off when his phone started to ring, prompting him to pull the item in question out of his pocket and accept the call.

"Hello?" he said, looking at his friends in obvious confusion as he did so. "Who's this?"

His expression soured as he listened to the response on the other end of the line, even as he stepped back from the rest of the group slightly to prevent Angel or Spike hearing what was being said on the other end.

"_What_?" he said after a few seconds, his eyes widening in shock at the news he'd just heard. "But _how_-? Any suspects? Anything he might have pissed off... more than the usual amount, anyway?"

The rest of the team exchanged silent glances, but none of them were able to provide answers for the questions that they were currently asking themselves.

"Yeah, I'll look into it," Gunn said, nodding grimly before he terminated the connection and looked at the rest of his team with an apprehensive expression that made it clear he didn't know how they were going to react to what he was about to say. "We've got a problem; that was Sienna on the phone-"

"Sienna?" Spike repeated, looking at Gunn with a slight smile. "Old girlfriend, Charlie-boy?"

"Girl I trained up to run the old crew after things fell apart with that old gang 'o mine," Gunn clarified, looking pointedly at Spike before he turned his attention back to his teammates. "Anyway, she heard on the grapevine that the old gang are rallying together again after Rondell snuffed it couple of nights back-"

"Hold on; Rondell?" Lorne said, his eyebrows raised as he looked at Gunn. "As in, the guy who trashed Caritas on what was to be my second big opening? The guy who tried to kill my customers for nothing more than being demons?"

"In a nutshell," Gunn confirmed with a grim nod. "Knew he was still doing the demon busting bit even if I haven't really been able to keep track of him- he's on the move a lot more these days-, but last I'd heard he'd learned not to attack something unless he's seen it going after something else-"

"Sorry; what are you talking about?" Matt asked, 'looking' in confusion between the group around him.

"Oh, right; you weren't there," Gunn said, looking apologetically at Matt. "Back before I joined these guys, I ran my own crew- we worked to keep demons and vamps off the streets, protecting the neighbourhood from things that went bump in the night, that kinda thing- but after I began to drift away from 'em to work with Angel, this new guy, Gio, turned 'em into a straightforward anti-demon group, killing every demon that they could find just because they were demons even if they hadn't actually _done _anything to anyone."

"Oh," Matt said, swallowing slightly as he considered that news in his mind.

He admitted that his experience of this new supernatural world that Angel had revealed to him was limited, but if his confrontation with Bullseye and the Kingpin had taught him anything, it was that things had never been as simple as he'd tried to convince himself they'd been back in the old days when he'd just gone out and tried to kill people conventional justice couldn't punish.

As much as you might like to imagine things could be black and white, nothing was ever that simple; attacking people who couldn't be caught by conventional means was one thing, but it was too easy to reach a point where you set yourself up as judge and jury on everyone no matter how noble your intentions were when you started out...

"So what happened to these sods after you found out what they were doing?" Spike asked, looking at Gunn inquiringly.

"Well, among other things, Gio got his head bitten off by an insect-like thing when he tried to take over Lorne's old club, but for the rest..." Gunn shrugged slightly. "Rondell and a few others did a bit more digging in Gio's past after his death- turned out his sister died in an accident that was labelled as gang activity but screamed 'demon' all over if you know they're there- and with a few more people bein' reminded of a few times Angel helped us take out a couple of vamp nests, we managed to get them re-focused back on the old mission."

"Up to a point, I assume?" Wesley asked, raising an eyebrow slightly.

"Well, they're all mostly working in smaller groups now- nobody's got much faith in single leaders after what happened to Gio and I still ended up pallin' round with you guys-, but Rondell still helps 'em make sure nobody's going to do anything stupid, and I've got a few who are more willing to listen to me than the rest," Gunn explained. "Anyway, the point is, with Rondell dead, we've got at least half the groups out to find whoever did it and get their own back; they're staking out a few demonic hotspots already, but if people stir up _too_ much trouble when there's this 'Elektra' girl- if it _is_ her- to think about on top of everything else, we could have a bit more to worry about."

"Damnit..." Angel groaned, rolling his eyes as he looked over at Wesley. "I take it we've got a few clients in that area?"

"More than a few, actually, although we could probably stand to lose some of them without affecting our client base _too _much-" Wesley began.

"Wait, what?" Matt asked.

"Something we should probably clarify, Matty; at least half the people on the client list before Peaches here took charge were unrepentantly evil," Spike said by way of explanation. "He's working on changing that, of course- one reason he hired you, after all; we wanted a few lawyers we _knew _weren't just out for themselves-, but he can't do _that _much to the evil ones already on the books or he loses the resources we need to make a positive impact on people..."

"Ah," Matt said, nodding in understanding before he turned his attention back to the matter at hand. "So, these old friends of yours... you think they're going to make things more difficult out there unless they find out who killed Rondell?"

"That's putting it simply, but that's pretty much it in a nutshell anyway, yeah," Gunn confirmed.

"Well, at least _that's _something I can understand..." Matt said, before he realised what he'd just said and looked apologetically over at Gunn. "Not that I-"

"I get it; just thinking of the gang example 'cause it's easier, huh?" Gunn said, nodding reassuringly at him. "Hey, I get what you mean; we actually tried to _encourage _that view sometimes back in the day to stop the wrong kind of people paying too much attention to us..."

"The point is, I don't exactly think Rondell's death on top of some of the recent attacks we've been dealing with lately can be considered a coincidence," Angel said, looking resolutely around at his team. "Whatever it is, we should probably check it out; might be our best chance of getting some answers."

"Right," Matt said, as he sat up on his bed to look at the others. "I'll just-"

"And who said _you _were going?" Fred asked, looking resolutely at the leather-clad lawyer.

"I'm not in _that _bad shape, Miss Burkle," Matt said, looking over at her with a slight smile. "I actually got stabbed in the shoulder at one point, and I still managed to take down the Kingpin's top assassin before I took him down later that night."

"Really?" Fred said, momentarily impressed before she shook that thought off. "But that doesn't change the facts; you're not operating at your peak and we don't know _what's _behind this-"

"I've been breaking up gang battles for years; this might be motivated by different factors than what I'm used to dealing with, but the basic facts should remain the same," Matt retorted, reaching over to where his mask lay on a nearby table and putting it on his head; as much as he hated to ignore the possibility that Elektra might be back, protecting innocent people had to take priority right now. "I wouldn't want to go up against anything with Angel's kind of strength, but I've handled entire bars before; I think I can handle a few gangs, especially if we're fighting in the street."

"Probably will, anyway," Gunn confirmed. "After what Gio made 'em do, they don't go after anything unless they _know _it's killing people, which tends to mean they take 'em out on the street when they see it tryin' something; vamps are the only exception to the rule."

"Good to know," Matt said, nodding in acknowledgement at Gunn before he turned to face Angel. "I know this is a bit sudden, but I _can _do this, Angel."

After staring appraisingly back at Matt for a moment, Angel nodded.

"You're in," he said, reaching out to shake Matt's hand, taking a firm grip of the offered limb to reinforce his next statement given Matt's inability to be intimidated by a stare. "Just remember; you're good at what you do, but we're going into a situation where your area of expertise meets _my _area of expertise; if things get ugly, follow _my _lead, understand?"

"Fair enough," Matt replied with a nod.

"Good," Angel said, before he turned to look at Gunn, Wes and Spike. "OK, we know the situation, and we've got an idea of the area; let's roll."


	10. The Figure in the Street

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).

Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.

Justice is Blind

Looking back, Matt wasn't sure what he'd found strangest about the current situation; the fact that he was going out to help stop a group of people who fought and hunted demons for a living, or the fact that he was doing so while working in a group himself.

Actually, since he'd always tried to have a belief that there was _something _else out there even if he'd not always been that comfortable exploring that belief in greater depth- as Father Everett had pointed out, back when he'd started out Matt had been more interested in permission than forgiveness before he realised the need for a greater line between him and his enemies-, he supposed that it was the group thing that was the real problem right now. He'd never liked the idea of fighting alongside others because there was always a chance that he'd hit his allies by accident because he wouldn't have the time to distinguish their heartbeats from those of his enemies.

Admittedly, that wouldn't be as much of a problem with Angel- he was aware of the vampire when he was moving, but the lack of a heartbeat made him distinctive in the current group-, but even that wouldn't be much help if they were dealing with multiple vampires; if what they'd told him about demons was accurate, right now his only guaranteed hope of keeping track of everyone on his side was to focus on hitting anyone down there who didn't look human and hope that nothing more complicated came up.

"You're sure you can do this?" Angel's voice asked, breaking into Matt's train of thought as they turned another corner and proceeded down the street; Matt's knowledge of Los Angeles was still a work in progress, but judging by the faint sounds of combat he could hear he had a feeling that they were coming close to their destination.

"Just let me know what's there and I'll do what I can to help out," Matt confirmed, nodding briefly at Angel as he reached up to check his glasses once again (He still felt uncomfortable wearing glasses rather than his usual mask, but if they were going up against demons Angel had made a valid point that they didn't want one of Gunn's gang attacking him by accident in case they just saw the horns before they realised that it was only a costume).

"Sure you don't need anything else?" Gunn asked. "I mean, those sticks of yours-"

"They've always done the job so far; I know how to use them, so I'll continue to use them unless you have a clear reason why I shouldn't," Matt said with a grim nod at his fellow lawyer, shortly before Angel's car came to a halt.

"All right," the vampire said- Matt wondered how long it would take him to get used to Angel's presence; now that he was aware that there was something up with the guy, the absence of Angel's heartbeat to his senses seemed almost unnerving-, as he brought the car to a halt and turned back to address the rest of the group in the car, the sound of combat faintly audible from outside the car. "From what I can see here, we've got about a dozen members of Gunn's old gang dealing with various vampires and what looks like a couple of demons. Matt, the vampires don't seem to be armed; if I have a weapon, would that help you distinguish me from them?"

"So long as you keep a hold of it, probably," Matt confirmed. "Vampires can be stopped with a wooden stake to the heart, right?"

"Decapitation would also work, but it's a bit trickier to accomplish, so I'd stick with the stake method," Gunn confirmed with a nod. "Plus, some things you might run into here can't exactly be taken out with decapitation- armoured skin, you know-, but going for the eyes with stakes is pretty much always an effective way of stopping the other guy."

"I'll... keep that in mind," Matt said, pausing for a moment before he turned in his seat slightly to better address Gunn. "If we're going to do this, I have to know now; will there be _any _demons there who might just be doing a job and be willing to find a way to live in this world that _doesn't _involve killing people?"

"Not likely," Gunn said after a few moments of silence, his heartbeat showing no signs of deception as he spoke. "The crew's been focusing on the areas where the more violent demons tend to hang out- bonus of having access to Wolfram & Hart's resources is that they represent most of the demons in the area who can't blend in enough to deal with regular law firms, so I was able to direct some of them away from the areas where the more humane demons hang out-, but I won't lie and say that there _might _be a few merc-like demons there..."

"Never mind," Matt said, cutting Gunn off with a firm nod. "I'll just focus on the ones who seem to be really enjoying their 'work' and take it all from there."

It wasn't a perfect plan, but with the stakes that they were possibly dealing with at the moment he didn't have the time to try and work out something more detailed. Faced with a choice between a potential demonic gang war spilling into the streets and the possibility of killing people who were just doing a job, Matt would focus on preventing the gang war first and worry about other details later.

As the car came to a stop, Matt didn't even need his enhanced hearing to be aware of the sound of violence nearby, the feral growls and roars accompanying the sounds of combat making it quickly clear that humans weren't the dominant fighters in the nearby conflict.

As Angel, Gunn and Wes opened their doors and moved into battle, Matt did the same thing, years of habit as Daredevil allowing him to quickly take in the area around him- sparing a few moments to focus on where his current allies were- before he leapt into action, the stakes his allies had provided for him quickly being used as he impaled the nearest couple of vampires.

Ignoring the slight smell of decay he sensed as the vampires collapsed into the dust that they should have been long ago, Matt quickly ducked under a blow from what seemed to be a particularly large demon before he used his stakes to impale it in the eyes, allowing himself a moment of grim satisfaction as it fell before he pulled the stakes out and ducked under a blow from another vampire.

Kicking out at the creature's chin as he rose back onto his feet, Matt followed his attack up with a quick series of punches to the vampire's face before he threw it into a box that he'd 'noticed' had been broken earlier when another demon was thrown into it; his opponent landed neatly on a wooden board that impaled it through the heart (Vampires really weren't that durable; a human could never have been stabbed with wood that easily).

In some ways, the ease with which he could kill these vampires made the current fight better and worse for him.

Ever since his confrontation with Fisk, Matt had tried to avoid using lethal force in combat, accepting his epiphany that killing all of his opponents made him fundamentally no better than his enemies no matter how much harder it made them at the same time, but given that vampires were _already _dead, and most demons were apparently incapable of interacting with humans in any way apart from just trying to kill them or trigger some kind of upheaval that would have killed innocent people, he could put that particular rule aside with relative ease.

On the other hand, killing people should just not be this _easy_; in the heat of battle, he was amazed at the mount of training the people around him must have had to avoid hitting anyone who was on their side (A few of the ones he hadn't met before seemed to get a bit edgy when they were close to Angel, but they didn't actually _do _anything to him)...

Once this was over, he should probably see about relocating back to New York; as much as he appreciated Angel's respect for his reputation and admired the vampire's resolve to try and use Wolfram & Hart's resources to help others, he wasn't sure he felt comfortable putting himself in this kind of position again.

Scoping the area around him with his senses, Matt was surprised to note that the violence already seemed to be dying down, and most of the human heartbeats he'd heard when he'd initially arrived on the scene- demon heartbeats tended to vary in rhythm from human ones; it was probably their different physiologies- were still going strong while several demon ones had stopped-

A particular heartbeat from a corner of the battlefield- its distance gave the impression that the individual was trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves- suddenly reached his ears, and Matt froze.

Even amid the chaos surrounding him, he would recognise that heartbeat anywhere; for those few, brief moments that he had spent wrapped in the arms of the person whose heart beat in that manner, it had become irrevocably imprinted on his memory in a manner that nothing could ever erase.

"_Elektra_!" he yelled out, looking urgently in her approximate direction, his radar-like hearing quickly allowing him to focus on the 'sight' of a young woman dressed in such tight clothing that his radar senses allowed him to almost 'see' her in a way he hadn't 'seen' anyone since the first, last and only night they'd spent together, sai daggers in each hand as she advanced through the combat around her, her attention seemingly focused on Angel.

For a moment after Matt had spoken, the figure was still before it turned to face him, Matt already reaching up to remove his makeshift mask-

* * *

The sound of a sudden grunt of pain behind him prompted Wesley to quickly stake the vampire to his left as he turned around to look at the source of the noise, his gaze quickly taking in the unconscious form of Matt Murdock, lying on the ground as a creature that looked like a Fyarl demon stood over him, fists raised as though it was about to bring them down. For a moment Wesley could only stare in horror as the Fyarl raised its fists in preparation for a blow clearly intended to shatter Matt's skull- Wesley was too far away to reach his new friend in time and neither Angel or Gunn were close enough to reach him-, but then something swift and shining seemed to fly around the demon's neck before his body hit the ground, his head rolling away to the side soon after.

The Fyarl's remains had barely reached the ground before Wesley saw the figure who had to be the reason for the vampire's sudden collapse. The new figure was an extremely fit-looking woman dressed in a tight red outfit with long dark hair, a tight red 'scarf' tied around her mouth and nose that left only her vivid eyes exposed, two sharp sai daggers in each hand and a dark symbol on her chest that resembled a bloody handprint.

"Oh my God..." Wesley whispered, his eyes widening in realisation as he looked at the woman with renewed interest.

He'd heard of this cult, of course, but even among Watchers they were generally assumed to be more of a myth than a reality; the idea that he was facing a trained warrior of the _Hand _themselves...

Before he could say anything to this woman, she had turned around, thrown a dagger in another direction, and vanished just as Wesley heard a strangled yell of pain from a voice he recognised despite its current apparent 'handicap'.

"_Angel_!" he yelled, hurrying in the direction of the voice, noting in relief that most of the fighting had stopped now; the only people still standing were Gunn's old associates- even if most of them were looking sceptically at Gunn's new suit- and Gunn himself, all of whom were looking at Angel with certain degrees of anxiety. The vampire had a large dagger sticking into the side of his neck, blood leaking from his lips as his mouth opened in a silent scream of pain, but after the wound Wesley had seen Angel sustain in the first fight with the Beast he was fairly certain that this wouldn't be enough to put Angel down for good; he'd be in pain, but give him a few hours of silence and a decent amount of blood and he'd recover eventually.

"Get him to the car," he said, looking grimly up at Gunn.

"Matt?" Gunn asked.

"Unconscious, but nothing serious; I'll get him back myself and we can check them over back at the office," Wesley replied, grimly making a note to try and find out what he could find about that symbol as soon as he was sure his friends were going to be all right.

If he was right about that symbol's origins, it _would _account for Matt's theory that the person targeting Angel was this 'Elektra' person he'd mentioned; the only question was whether what he was going to read would help him find the answers they _needed_, rather than just what would be interesting in this current mess...

* * *

As the group began to carry Angel and Matt back to the car, the dark-clad figure with the handprint on her chest could only stare in silent confusion at the sight in front of her.

Who _was _her target if he could keep moving after two such decisive wounds to the body?

And what the _hell _had that thing with the horns been?

And that man... the man who'd spoken to her... the man who'd used a name that she recognised without knowing _how _she recognised it...

She _felt _that she should be able to make a connection between that name and the man, but she just couldn't _place _it; every time she tried to concentrate, she just felt this frustrating _headache_...

After a few moments of silence, she shook that thought off and stood back up, intent on getting on with business; she had to confirm her target's fate, and if she hadn't completed her task yet, she'd need to figure out another way to kill him.

If her masters in the Hand were going to extend their influence into this part of the world, they agreed with their contact's recommendation; they were going to need to prove themselves to Wolfram & Hart before they could get any _real _respect, and what better way to do that than to eliminate someone with the kind of reputation that this 'Angel' possessed?


	11. History of the Hand

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **_Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:_  
_Elektra being behind all the murders._  
_Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly._  
_Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel._  
_Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy._  
_Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

AN: A few liberties taken with the origins of the Hand recounted here, but I generally try to stick to their comic history; hope you like it

Justice is Blind

"Wesley?" Fred asked, knocking on the door of the room where the Watcher had secluded himself since arriving back at the firm. "Are you OK?"

"Mmm?" Wesley asked, glancing up from the template book he was currently reading, a grim expression on his face. "Oh, about as well as I could be... how are Matt and Angel?"

"Coming along," Fred replied, shrugging slightly awkwardly. "The dagger to Angel's throat went through fairly cleanly, so there's not been that much damage, but it's still not going to be pretty; we've got him on a few blood IVs that are helping him heal, but he won't be able to talk much more than a few words at a time for a while."

"But he can listen?" Wesley asked, standing up to look more intently at Fred.

"Well... he's awake, and he knows we're there, so-" Fred began.

"Good," Wesley said, picking up the book and heading for the door. "Get everyone together; if Angel and Matt are awake, it's best that we explain what's happening as soon as possible so that we can come up with some kind of plan."

He just hoped that he wasn't over-estimating their skills; whatever had prompted someone in the Hand to send what appeared to be Matt's resurrected lover after Angel, there was no way to work out what they'd need to do in order to get the Hand to cease their attacks on him without just killing the vampire...

* * *

As the woman who had once been known as Elektra Natchios sat in her temporary apartment, her gaze fixed on the wall in front of her as she meditated and planned her next step, she was already going over her next move.

The Hand's contacts might have failed to inform them of the full details of Angel's capabilities when they recruited her- he was certainly a lot more durable than they had been given to believe, even if she wasn't entirely sure what he _was_-, but there was only so much damage that any form could take before it would expire for good; now that she knew what _couldn't _kill Angel, it was time to go for the more direct approach and attempt something that she _knew _would work.

She just wished she knew why, in her last attempt, she'd been so easily diverted from her original goal by the thought of the threat posed by that... creature (She was aware that there were demons out there, but she still hadn't expected to confront something that big in the middle of Los Angeles) to that man; all she knew for certain was that, when she heard that man say that name, she'd felt... _something_... that made her feel like leaving him to get killed by that creature when she could at least potentially stop it would be virtually impossible.

Who _was _that man in red leather?

What was the source of this strange... _itch_ she felt in the back of her mind whenever she thought about him?

Why did she keep getting a feeling like there was something more going on here than just her assignment...?

* * *

"Matt?" Wesley said as he walked into the building's infirmary, looking anxiously at the lawyer even as Gunn, Lorne and Fred were already sitting around him and Angel while Spike stood slightly off to the back. "How are you?"

"Bit sore, but I'll get there," Matt said, sitting up from where he still lay in his bed, the bruises and cuts he'd sustained from the previous night's fight still visible even if they were also obviously healing. "How's everyone else?"

"Surviving," Angel muttered from the bed next to Matt's, his hand briefly reaching up to rub at his still-healing throat before he looked back at Wesley with a slightly quizzical look.

"Well," the ex-Watcher said, recognising what Angel wanted to say to him if it wasn't for his injury, looking around the room at the rest of the firm's current senior staff before he continued, "I've finished my reading, and I believe I've identified the cult we're dealing with based on the symbol that the woman we believe to be Elektra was wearing."

"So... you know who brought her back?" Matt asked (Wesley noticed that Matt hadn't said anything about the fact that he'd drawn attention to the issue that they only _believed _they were dealing with Elektra at the moment, but this wasn't the time to press that issue; so long as Matt was focused on the current situation, that was what mattered).

"_Potentially_, anyway," the ex-Watcher said, looking pointedly at Matt for a moment to ensure that the other man understood that he still wasn't certain about the accuracy of what he was about to say or Matt's theory about who they were up against before he continued. "The symbol I saw the woman you identified as Elektra wearing seemed to be the symbol of the Hand, a Japanese cult of ninja warriors who were first established around four centuries ago, but I wouldn't like to swear to it; contact with the Hand is hard to come by, given that they tend to kill most people who see them-"

"What's their history?" Angel asked, looking firmly at Wesley before he lapsed back into silence, wincing as he rubbed the wound on his throat.

"According to reports, the Hand came into existence about five centuries ago, in 1588, when a man called Kagenobu Yoshioka became sensei of the Ishiyama Sword School in the Japanese village of Kyushua," Wesley explained. "Facing growing frustrations with the corrupt government that had been tainted by foreign influence, Yoshioko transformed the school into a training ground for samurais whose goal was to put power back in the hands of the Japanese people, naming it 'the Hand' with the idea that members of the inner circle of the Hand were leaders of organizations which each operated from one of Japan's five islands. Their intentions were honourable, but things became more problematic after Yoshioka was murdered, allowing the Snakeroot ninja clan to take control of the Hand and corrupt it by imposing the cult of a demon known as The Beast, which imparted them with dark magic."

"Is that where 'Elektra' comes into this?" Gunn asked.

"Possibly," Wesley confirmed with a nod. "According to reports, one of these black spells allows the Hand to return a member's lifeless body to dust, allegedly to prevent another from directly gazing at the Beast itself, but other sources state that the Hand could also resurrect their warriors if they acquired the body soon enough after death. There's actually some debate about the implications of this ritual- according to some sources, the ritual also brainwashes the person being resurrected to be loyal to the Hand after their revival-, but there's so little hard evidence about the Hand that it's hard to know-"

"That's what happened," Matt said resolutely.

"To this 'Elektra' girl?" Lorne said, looking over at Matt inquiringly. "I mean, I get that you want her back-"

"It's her," Matt said, glaring over at Lorne in a resolute manner that was actually made more intense by his essentially dead eyes rather than lessened, before he turned back to face Wesley. "How do we break the conditioning?"

"There are a few ideas about burning out aggression, but I wouldn't like to give you any definitive answers without knowing what kind of spells were used to bring her under his control in the first place; every kind of spell involving mental manipulation on this scale works on a different basis to the others-" Wesley began.

"So, if we capture her, we can work out what to do to break her?" Matt interrupted, still clearly resolute to follow this train of thought through to its conclusion.

"Well... most likely, yes," Wesley replied.

"Uh... not meaning to sound morbid or anything, but we _do _have an advantage in that regard," Fred said, looking awkwardly over at Angel. "I mean, we know that she seems to be after you, and she probably doesn't know _exactly_ what you are if the methods she's used to try and stop you so far are any indication, so maybe if we-"

"Set a trap?" Angel finished for Fred, the low tone of his voice suggesting that he disapproved even if the slight smile he gave her in addition to the comment hinted at his feelings being different.

"On that topic, any ideas why these guys are after Angel?" Gunn asked. "I mean, DD here was hired so recently that his ex showing up like this is probably just a really freaky coincidence, but there's got to be a reason she's trying to kill him, right?"

"There could be a variety of answers to that question, unfortunately; there's no way to know which one's correct," Wesley said apologetically. "Unlike other ninja factions, the Hand can either work as mercenaries for allies of convenience or try to claim power for themselves by eliminating their enemies; they could just be trying to eliminate Angel so that they can limit Wolfram & Hart's influence over Los Angeles, they could have been hired to kill him, or any number of intervening factors."

"Yeah, from what I heard, you've made things _pretty _difficult for some of this place's old clientele to get things done the way they liked things done in the past..." Matt said, muttering slightly at the thought before he shuddered as something else occurred to him. "And I don't think I even _want_ to know what they got up to when they weren't dealing with shady legal dealings in the human world..."

"Trust us; you don't," Lorne said, shaking his head as he looked grimly at the blind lawyer. "Some of the things these guys did make _me _shudder, and I read the futures of guys who ate kids when they weren't at the club..."

"Huh?" Matt said, looking over at Lorne in confusion.

"Lorne's species- or at least, Lorne himself can do it; music as a concept doesn't exist where he comes from so we're not sure if he's an anomaly or everyone could do it if they tried- have the ability to see the futures of others if they sing in front of him," Wesley explained. "Before he joined us full-time- admittedly, after a couple of our cases resulted in his club being destroyed-, Lorne ran a karaoke bar that served as a demonic sanctuary, being a location that was enchanted so that no demon could start a fight inside it, and occasionally helped clientele find their ways by reading their futures and guiding them accordingly."

"Ah," Matt said, a slightly sceptical but contemplative tone in his voice as he 'looked' in Lorne's direction, his natural scepticism at that kind of claim at war with the knowledge that they wouldn't lie to him. "That must be... interesting."

"It's like anything else, my red devil; it has its perks and downers," Lorne said, smiling casually at Matt before he looked over at Angel. "And talking of things having downers, how long until you're ready for us to try that trap strategy?"

"And what should we do for that anyway?" Fred asked, looking uncertainly at her friends. "I mean, we need something that won't allow her to get away _too _easily, but we can't make it _obvious _that we're trying to trap her... I'm sorry, I'm more used to us going after people rather than trying to lure them in like this..."

"I've got a plan," Angel said, smiling slightly as he looked around at his friends. "Basic, but it works."

He might have still reached up to tenderly touch his throat after that comment, but the fact that Angel felt comfortable even making that kind of joking comment was all the proof his team needed that he was on his way to recovery.

Whatever plan they came up with to capture Elektra, they _would _succeed in doing so.

With all of them united in their efforts to come up with such a plan, failure wasn't even a possibility.

* * *

AN 2: Like Angel said, I _do _have a plan for the trap next chapter, but suggestions about what people would like to see would be appreciated (We're approaching the conclusion of this story so I'd like to know that I'm giving people what they want to see)


	12. The Final Attempt

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

_**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:_  
_Elektra being behind all the murders._  
_Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly._  
_Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel._  
_Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy._  
_Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

AN: To cut off questions in advance, the 'jet boots' Elektra uses here are inspired by the storyline _Wolverine: Enemy of the State_, when Elektra and various other brainwashed heroes and villains in HYDRA's 'employ' used similar devices during an attack on the SHIELD Helicarrier

AN 2: Some ideas here came from _Shadowland_, but I've put my own spin on it that I hope you'll all enjoy

Justice is Blind

As Elektra stood on top of the building where she had planned her upcoming ambush, she wondered how such a supposedly simple assignment had become so complicated.

She'd had two opportunities to kill this 'Angel' guy in a fight when it would have been easy for people to assume that he'd been the victim of comparatively random acts of violence, and both times had failed because he'd proven to be a more resilient individual than she'd been lead to believe; she wasn't entirely sure _what _he was, but it was clear that she was up against something that was far from human.

Still, right now, what he was didn't matter; all that mattered was that she had to kill him if she was going to complete her assignment, and the only way it seemed that she was going to pull _that _off was to abandon her original plan for a stealth approach and attack him directly when he wasn't expecting it.

Tracking down his apartment had actually been relatively straightforward- the man actually lived in the penthouse at the top of his office; a part of her considered it pathetic how easy it was to locate him, as though he didn't even care about the enemies he must have made to reach this point-, and all that she had needed to do since then was confirm that she could enter the building without setting off any alarms before she was ready to deal with them. As expected, the penthouse was equipped with various alarms, but most of them were focused on someone entering the room from the interior rather than the exterior; given the height of the building, they had most likely assumed that nobody would be able to access it from that avenue.

Unfortunately for them, Elektra's backers were not normal people. The small 'jet boots' that she had been provided with to gain access felt somewhat strange, but that didn't mean that she didn't recognise their potential value in this kind of situation, to say nothing of the personal bonus that they would only last long enough to get her in while leaving her solely responsible for her escape; she hated relying on anything but herself to complete her assignments.

Studying the view in front of her for a few more crucial seconds, Elektra went over the statistics that her assignment handlers had provided her with after she'd received the boots; while the window was too far for a glider or any kind of grapple to reach from her current position, the boots should provide her with a continuous burst of speed that would allow her to penetrate the window so long as she was careful to protect her face from the worst of the glass. Pulling out the binoculars she'd packed earlier, Elektra took a quick glance at the window before her, and smiled grimly as she noted her target lying in his bed, seemingly dead to the world, so still that she couldn't even see him breathing despite the allegedly enhanced nature of the binoculars.

It was time to strike.

Refusing to give herself even a moment to hesitate, Elektra launched herself off the roof and hurtled towards her target, the boots sending her flying directly towards the rapidly-expanding glass window before her. Her hands outstretched before her, Elektra shifted her daggers so that their handles would strike the window first, the solid handles shattering the glass immediately around her before her momentum shattered the rest of the window.

As she landed in the apartment, Elektra wasn't entirely surprised when her target sat up in bed and grabbed a blade lying on the ground near his bed- clearly he had learned to be cautious after her previous attacks; she should have been prepared for that, but she was becoming too focused on her current goal to remember the minute details-, but then two doors opened on either side of the room and four more men walked in, three of them armed with various close-quarter weapons that they wielded with the ease of trained professionals while the fourth- a man with pale hair in a long leather coat- stood with the practised ease of a combat specialist.

Despite the obvious threat posed by the swords and axe in the hands of two of the men in front of her, Elektra's eyes were drawn to the third anomaly; a man in red glasses and a full-body leather suit, holding what looked like two short sticks in his hands, held in a manner that made it clear they were weapons despite their seemingly harmless nature.

"A trap?" she said, looking at the group before her with a slight smile. "It's been a while since someone tried something like that on me."

"We aim to keep you on your toes," the man in glasses said, shrugging slightly as he looked at her with a grim smile. "I hate to sound cliché, but you should stand down now, Mrs Natchios; it will make everything a _lot _easier for you-"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Elektra said, her grip tightening on her daggers as she looked at the man in front of her, ignoring that now-familiar strange feeling she got in the back of her skull when that name was mentioned. "I came here to eliminate my target, and that's all I was here for; simply withdraw now, and the rest of you can live-"

"Not happenin', girl," the dark-skinned man in the suit said, his attire giving the impression that it was slightly uncomfortable on him, as though he wasn't used to wearing something like that, even as he tightened his grip on a large axe in his hands. "We came here to help Angel and you, but don't think that means we're goin' to let you off with just a warning if things get ugly."

"Help _me_?" Elektra repeated, a slightly sarcastic smirk on her face as she looked at him, training and confidence allowing her to push aside whatever part of her wanted to hear him continue; if she avoided giving him a chance to speak, he probably wouldn't. "Why would you want to-?"

"For God's sake, Elektra, it's _me_!" the man in the red glasses suddenly yelled at her, staring earnestly in her direction as he pulled off the glasses that were his most distinguishing feature, revealing- Elektra almost couldn't believe what she was seeing after she'd witnessed the way the man had fought earlier; she'd trained to fight in the dark, but what was in front of her was something else entirely- blank white eyes in a face that somehow managed to successfully convey pain even when they couldn't show anything-

Something in Elektra seemed to snap in the back of her mind.

She _knew _that face...

Those eyes...

The eyes that saw nothing, in the face of the man who saw her in a manner that she never believed anyone could see her in... the man who'd seen past her wealth, skills, and pain to see who she could be underneath it all... the man who'd made her feel so much more than she could have ever felt before...

"M... Matt?" she whispered, looking tentatively at him, assignment forgotten in the face of this new discovery. "It's... it's..."

Before she could finish that sentence, Elektra was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that something had just tried to charge straight through her face after ramming into the back of her head-

* * *

"_**ENOUGH**_!" a voice suddenly yelled from Elektra's mouth before the group around her could react, Elektra's eyes flaring red as she lunged towards Angel with her daggers outstretched. Gunn and Wesley leapt in to try and defend their friend, but Elektra almost effortlessly knocked them to the side with a rapid series of kicks before either man could realise what had just happened, subsequently pinning the vampire to the wall before she turned back to glare at the downed fighters.

"_**THERE IS NO ELEKTRA NATCHIOS**_!" she roared, eyes flaring red in an obviously unnatural manner. "_**There is only me, my emissary, and her mission**_!"

With that, she turned around and leapt back to attack Angel, the vampire only just managing to knock her back as he yanked one of the daggers out of his shoulder and struck her in the face with the blunt end. Elektra's momentary loss of balance gave Angel just the opportunity he needed to pull the second dagger out of his other shoulder, only for a rapid kick to the face from Elektra to send him staggering back as she grabbed the weapons in her hands.

Regaining his balance, Angel managed to deflect the daggers before they could repeat their previous attack, but was clear that the vampire was having far more trouble with the fight than he should have been when up against a purely human opponent; Elektra's blows were rapidly reaching a force and speed that he hadn't seen even from Buffy at her worst.

Taking a quick final glance around himself to confirm that everyone who should be in his room was there, Angel grabbed Elektra's wrist as she launched her next attack and hurled her through the open door near his bed, swiftly diving after her into his penthouse's lounge area; it might not be that much larger, but at least he had less stuff in here that he'd object to losing, and his friends were out of the way to limit the possibility that they'd be claimed as collateral damage in the upcoming fight.

"Fine," he said, glaring at the woman before him, hoping that he gave a convincing impression of being focused on the current fight. "If you want it that way, let's dance."

* * *

"Well," Wesley said, looking over at where the dazed Matt lay with a grim smile after Angel and Elektra had left the room, "that answers the question of what we're up against."

"Which is?" Gunn asked, his stance constantly shifting as though he was trying to decide whether or not he should be going into the room to help Angel.

"A combination of the Hand's traditional brainwashing infused with at least a portion of the Beast that the inner circle of the cult are said to worship," Wesley explained, looking grimly over at the door to the other room where Angel was still fending off their latest foe. "From what Matt's told us, if Elektra had a desire for vengeance and anger in her heart before her death, she would make a suitable host for the Beast to further the Hand's agendaHanH; the presence of even a part of it is said to enhance the physical and mental combat capabilities of its host, which would certainly explain how she was powerful enough to decapitate a Fyarl demon in direct combat-"

"Yeah, great history lesson, Perce; can we focus on how to get that thing _out _of Miss Greek Tragedy?" Spike asked, jerking his head at a wall that had just sustained a fairly sizeable dent as something was kicked into it.

"There _is _a spell that might do the job- we've got a cabinet of ingredients just over there that I can use-, but I need a few minutes to be sure I've set everything up correctly..." Wesley said, picking up the template book he'd left on a nearby table earlier- if he'd needed to do further research he'd wanted to be sure that he could start virtually instantly- and quickly began to read over the instructions he summoned to him, pausing briefly to look up at Matt. "Matt, I recognise that this might be difficult for you, but if you could assist Angel by providing the emotional distraction required for this spell to affect Miss Natchios the way it's meant to- keep her off-balance, remind her of her past, that kind of thing- then, well..."

To his credit, despite his relative unfamiliarity with the rules of Wesley's world, Matt didn't even hesitate at the ex-Watcher's request, but instead simply turned around and headed for the door, leaving Gunn and Spike to look at Wesley in varying degrees of apprehension.

"You sure this is going to work?" Gunn asked.

"Given my relatively unfamiliarity with the Hand, I unfortunately _can't_ be certain, but it's our best chance at getting through to her," Wesley said, walking over to the emergency cabinet in Angel's room- they'd put a few emergency spell supplies in both rooms when planning this trap in case this kind of situation came up- and quickly selecting what was required for the current situation. "If we don't move quickly, there's a strong chance that someone will get seriously hurt, and if we let her get away now that the Beast has asserted itself we may not be able to access her true consciousness again; we have to move quickly while there's still a chance that we can reach the real Elektra Natchios rather than whatever remnant the Beast has been using."

If he remembered the purpose of this spell correctly, setting it up wouldn't be that difficult; it was maintaining the right mental focus to perform it correctly that would be particularly difficult...

* * *

As he ducked and weaved Elektra's assault, Angel had to admit that Matt hadn't been exaggerating her skills; this 'Beast' thing she'd mentioned was definitely enhancing her strength, but there was a raw talent underneath her power that he hadn't seen in anything short of a Slayer. She still didn't appear to have a significantly above-human-average level of strength, but she was clearly growing stronger as the battle continued, each blow getting closer and closer to delivering some kind of injury...

The sudden impact of wood on flesh provided a crucial distraction, Angel leaping backwards and out of harm's way as Elektra screamed in rage, one of her daggers falling to the ground as she carefully clutched at her bruised wrist while retaining a grip on her other dagger.

"_**YOU**_?" she practically growled, her gaze fixed on Matt Murdock as he stood in the door of the room, looking urgently at her as he drew back the arm, his billy-club coming back together as the string that joined the two retracted back into its counterpart.

"Me," he confirmed, his gaze fixed on her. "Don't make me do this, Elektra-!"

"_**There IS no Elektra**_!" she roared, charging forward to grab Matt's throat with one hand, the other holding her remaining dagger as she aimed it at his blank eyes. "_**If you wish a demonstration, I can**_-!"

"Think fast," Angel said, grabbing the dagger from the floor and charging towards Elektra, the blade outstretched towards her. As Elektra turned to resume her attack on her original target, Angel quickly shifted his dagger to block her own, the two sides quickly engaging in a close-quarter duel as the daggers interlocked and parted, Elektra's experience with these weapons countered by Angel's broader combat experience.

"Elektra, _stop this_!" Matt said, 'looking' urgently in her direction as the fight progressed around the room, his body tensed and ready to intervene if the opportunity arose to do so. "This isn't _you_; it's the Hand's goddamn Beast!"

"_**There is nothing of HER left in this body, Murdock**_!" Elektra roared, her focus remaining on her opponent even as she addressed Matt. "_**There is only ME**_-!"

"I don't accept that!" Matt yelled, Angel ducking under the latest attack from Elektra before he tried to yank the dagger out of Elektra's hand, only for the former heiress to nearly turn the attack back on him as she caught Angel's dagger's blades between her own and all but yanked it out of the vampire's grasp. "This is your _third _attempt to kill Angel, and you keep making _stupid_ mistakes; just because you don't know what he is-"

"_**Mistakes happen; they mean NOTHING**_-!" Elektra began to protest, only for Angel to take advantage of her distraction to kick her in the chest, sending her staggering back as she gasped for breath, momentarily winded by the force of the kick.

"Come on, Elektra, _focus_!" Matt said, 'looking' in her directly as urgently as his blank eyes would allow him to. "This isn't _you_! Don't let this... 'Beast' thing control you; you're stronger than that! I know you're in there; _fight _it!"

"_**Nice try... **_**Murdock**," Elektra said, her voice already regaining its original strength as she took a few deep breaths while staring in his direction. "_**But that... won't work... I **_**am**_**... here**_..."

"And so am I," another voice said from the door, prompting the trio to turn in the direction of the voice, only to witness a sudden, intense golden glow that swiftly faded to reveal Wesley standing in the door, his right fist outstretched in front of him, glowing with a golden energy as he clenched it in preparation for what he was about to attempt.

"Elektra Natchios?" Wesley said, his expression grim as he looked at her. "It's time to wake up."

Before Elektra could respond to that statement, Wesley had lunged forward and punched Elektra directly in her chest, sending her staggering backwards as golden energy seemed to envelop her body, her eyes rapidly shifting between the three men standing around her.

"_**What**_... Matt?" she began, her voice changing mid-sentence as she looked in his direction. "What... what happ...?"

As though those words had required the last of her energy, Elektra collapsed to the ground, her body twitching as her eyes stared out blankly at the world around her, leaving her former opponents standing apprehensively around her.


	13. Shadows of the Mind

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).

Requirements:  
Elektra being behind all the murders.  
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.  
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.  
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.  
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.

Justice is Blind

"Uh... you did all that just to punch her?" Gunn asked as he walked into the lounge area as Spike entered via the wall, indicating the bedroom where a small smoking pile of what Angel's nose sensed were herbs was visible in the middle of the floor.

"Not entirely," Wesley said, smiling slightly as he looked over at Angel and Matt, ignoring the unnervingly-twitching form of Elektra on the ground between them. "What I hit her with was cleansing psycho-kinetic _chi _energy, designed to temporarily force the Beast into submission; while she and the Beast are out of it, Matt and Angel can now take advantage of the temporary gap I created in her usual psychic defences to send themselves in-"

"Hold on; send ourselves in?" Angel repeated, looking incredulously at his friend. "Wes, we're not telepaths-!"

"The spell's negation of her mental barriers should cause the Beast to pull you in if you make physical contact with it; just focus on maintaining your own identities in the process and you should be able to reach Elektra without worrying about getting taken over by it," Wesley said, his tone relatively calm even if there was still a slight edge of anxiety about his stance. "The trick is to reach Elektra and reaffirm what's important to her; the Beast will be trying to make her focus on the personal failures that she would naturally want to retreat from, but you have to convince her to put those aside if you're going to get her out of there."

"And then... what?" Angel asked, an uncertain expression on his face as he studied his friend.

"I can't say," Wesley said grimly. "You'll know what seems right when you're there, but right now we have little time; the sooner you can make contact with Elektra, the better your chances are of getting her out of there intact."

"Back up the part about the Beast trying to pull them in?" Gunn asked, looking pointedly at Wesley. "Why would it be doing that?"

"Well..." Wesley said, looking slightly awkwardly at the vampire and the lawyer, "with Elektra weakened, the Beast will probably be trying to transfer into another host now that it's established that Elektra's skills aren't making it as effective as it could be, but without any rituals being performed it would require someone to make physical contact in the right place on its current body- in this case, the head- to give it the chance to try and 'jump ship'; you'd be prepared for the attack, so you _should _be able to fight it off, but I can't make any promises given the age and potential power of what we're up against..."

After a few solemn moments of contemplation as the five men took in what had just been said, the newest member of the group broke the silence.

"This is the only way to get her back?" Matt asked, looking grimly at the Watcher.

"From what I've found out about this creature, yes," Wesley replied.

"Then we'll do it," Matt said, glancing over at Angel.

"We're in," Angel said, smiling at the blind lawyer in agreement before he turned to face Wesley. "What do we do?"

"As I said, just touch Elektra's head and the Beast should do the rest; it's all rather straightforward, really," Wesley said, smiling briefly at his friends as they moved over to crouch down on either side of the warrior heiress. "Good luck."

With that, Angel and Matt placed their hands on either side of Elektra's face...

* * *

When Matt opened his eyes, it took him a few seconds to realise that he was looking at Angel; years of blindness hadn't totally robbed him of the memory of what colour looked like- he sometimes tried to imagine what some of them looked like just to make sure he still remembered, even if he acknowledged that he might be making a mistake-, but seeing a person's face in actual colour after so long just seeing them as 'images' in his mind...

Then he processed the fact that he was actually _seeing _something, and everything else essentially took a back seat.

"I... I can _see_..." he said, staring at his hands in front of his face- they were a lot more worn than he could have determined with his sonar senses; his time as Daredevil had _really _toughened his hands- before he looked over at Angel. "How...?"

"We're in Elektra's mind, Matt," Angel said, looking slightly awkwardly at Matt; he was evidently hoping that what he was about to say wouldn't disappoint the other man too much. "You're only blind _physically_, so, since you're not actually in your body right now..."

"Ah," Matt said, shaking his head grimly as he looked down at his current attire- he was wearing a leather outfit that he assumed was the same shade of red as his Daredevil costume underneath a suit jacket and trousers- before he looked back at Angel with a slight smile. "And this reflects my... mental perception of myself?"

"I've never seen you dress like that in real life, anyway," Angel said, before he turned around to study their surroundings, ignoring the implications of the fact that he was having to actively concentrate to stop himself assuming his vampire visage in their current environment; he was at least dressed in his usual black coat and trousers, so he didn't look as strange as Matt did. "Come on, we'd best get moving; we've got to find Elektra and get out of here before the Beast finishes what it's started."

Taking in his surroundings, Matt was only partly surprised to find that he was standing on what looked like a coloured version of the sonar views he'd always picked up of the New York city rooftops (He thought it might even be the area where he had 'seen' Elektra fighting Bullseye, but that wasn't important right now). After a moment's searching, his new eyes fell on a tall dark figure standing on a rooftop a few buildings over, holding a figure in one hand that looked vaguely female despite the distance between them.

"Is that...?" Matt asked, looking anxiously over at Angel.

"Most likely," Angel said, his eyes narrowing momentarily before he turned to look at Matt. "Look, the direct route is the best right now, but I have to know; can you keep up?"

"I've done this kind of thing in the real world for years; I can do it here when it's all mental," Matt said, nodding back at the vampire before he turned back to face the creature before them and began to run, Angel joining him a few seconds later. Whether Angel was holding back slightly or their current location simply meant that Matt could push himself further than usual, he found himself making leaps across alleys to the next buildings over that would have required far more effort if he had been doing this in the real world, to the point that they reached the roof with the large creature on top of it in only a few moments.

As Matt drew closer to the creature, he quickly realised that his initial assessment of the creature's physical condition wasn't entirely accurate, in that it was in simultaneously better and worse shape than what he'd initially assumed. The creature before them wasn't as large as it had seemed on first glance, probably reaching about six and a half feet if the horns weren't taken into account, but there was something about its overall physical appearance that gave an impression of deformity despite its size. Not only didn't the creature's right arm seem to be longer than the left one, but both arms were far longer and thinner than anyone would expect from a casual analysis of the creature's physical structure while retaining an impression of physical strength regardless.

"Oh my God..." Matt said, pausing a rooftop away from their target as he stared at the massive creature in front of them, its skin nearly pitch-black with red claws and horns as it put down the figure it had been holding and glared at them. "What _is _that?"

"Right now, I'm guessing it's the Beast that Wes mentioned had taken control of Elektra," Angel said, clenching his fists as he looked resolutely at their current opponent. "I'll keep it occupied; you see if you can get to Elektra and help her out of this mess."

Matt didn't bother arguing with Angel; even without the fact that he _wanted _to talk with Elektra right now, it was obvious that Angel was the best candidate for taking on something that big. After a final nod of resolution had been exchanged between the two, they leapt over the last gap, Angel quickly hurrying over to punch the Beast while Matt dashed towards the fallen form lying at its feet, barely even needing to translate his sonar impressions into a real-world perspective as he looked at her.

He might never have seen Elektra like this before, but he'd know this woman _anywhere_.

"Elektra," he said, hoping he didn't sound as flustered as he felt- of all the things that he'd experienced since coming to Wolfram & Hart, the restoration of his vision was nothing compared to the realisation that he was standing next to the _real _Elektra at long last-, "you have to wake up; it's _me_-"

His plea was cut short when Elektra suddenly raised her head and grabbed him by the throat, hauling herself to her feet as she rammed him against the nearest wall.

"What the _Hell _are you trying to pull?" she asked, glaring at him. "Do you think that I'll let you in-?"

As much as Matt hated to do this, he launched a quick punch at Elektra's face, forcing her to relinquish her grip as she staggered back long enough for him to assume a more combat-ready stance before she could try that again.

"OK," he said, looking resolutely at her, "I get that you've been through a lot lately, but this is _not _helping; I'm trying to _save _you, not _hurt _you."

"You're just another deception-!" Elektra began (Matt didn't bother to question why she didn't seem to know what was really happening here; there was probably some whole thing about Elektra not having any memory of her actions while the Beast was in control or something like that, but he'd worry about the specifics later).

"No, I'm not," Matt said, shaking his head as he looked resolutely at the woman he loved, ignoring the sounds of stone shattering as something- most likely Angel, given his smaller size- was thrown into whatever had just been broken; he had to trust that his strange new friend could handle whatever the Beast had to throw at him while he focused on his current task. "I know this is hard to believe, but I'm _real_, Elektra; I've made some... interesting... friends since we last met, and they were able to give me a chance to come in here and help you-"

"Help me _what_?" Elektra asked, looking in frustration at him; whether she believed that he was real or not was something Matt would worry about if it came up again. "My father _died_, I nearly got myself _killed_-!"

"You don't have to keep focusing on that," Matt said, hoping that he was choosing the right argument; he was good at defending his position in legal confrontations, but just _comforting _people was something else wasn't something he'd had much practise with in either of his identities. "You achieved your vengeance, Elektra-"

"I almost _killed you_-!" Elektra began desperately.

"_But you didn't_," Matt said, his tone firm as he stared at her, relishing these brief moments when he could see her as others did even if it wasn't technically real. "I'm alive, Elektra, and Bullseye and the Kingpin have been dealt with-"

"You could have _died _because of me-!" Elektra said, although Matt was relieved to note that she seemed to be less certain of what she was saying now; maybe he was starting to get through to her at last.

"But I _didn't_," Matt said, shifting his tone from firm to reassuring as he placed his hands on her shoulders; he didn't care if it was just because this was all taking place in their minds or not, but the feel of Elektra's skin under his fingers was just as good as he remembered it being. "You're _not _a killer, Elektra-"

"I'm as good as," Elektra said, her initial strength of will forgotten as she slumped to the ground in front of Matt, the sounds of battle still waging behind them even as he tried to focus on the woman he loved. "I let my anger control me, and it resulted in nothing but misery; you nearly died, _I _nearly died, and-"

"_No_," Matt said, tightening his grip on Elektra's arm as he stared at her. "You made some bad decisions, but we all fall victim to our worst qualities at some point or another; Hell, I used to _kill _people as Daredevil before I realised that I was just pushing myself to a point where I'd lost anything separating me from the other guy..."

He paused for a moment, trying to think of the best way to say this, before he finally decided to just go with the cliché option and say what was in his heart. "You made a few mistakes, but that doesn't mean that you deserve this; you have the strength to pick yourself up and learn from your mistakes... and I'll be there to help you do that."

"R... really?" Eektra asked, looking weakly up at him after a moment's silence, her expression showing a surprising vulnerability that he'd never seen from her even at her father's funeral. "You... you still... want me?"

"Always," Matt said, smiling at her for a moment, before the sound of another crash behind him prompted him to turn around, his eyes widening in shock at the sight of a bruised and battered Angel lying on the ground.

"Ouch..." Angel muttered, glancing over at the couple alongside him. "Tough guy... how's things... here?"

"We're-" Matt began, before something grabbed him by the throat and hauled him upwards, leaving him facing the red-eyed, sharp-toothed, smirking form of the Beast.

"_Ah... Matt Murdock_..." the Beast said, licking its lips with a forked tongue as it glared at him. "_So _nice _to see you in person_..."

"Get... _out_..." Matt growled, staring defiantly back at the Beast.

"_I don't think so_..." the creature said, smirking as it contemplatively studied him. "_Miss Natchios had potential in terms of training, but you... the man who defeated her killer..._"

"_No_," a firm voice said, Matt's gaze shifting from the creature holding him by the throat to the sight of Elektra standing resolutely in front of them, Angel looking dazedly up at them as he worked to regain his focus. "You will _not _take him as a host."

"_You cannot take control from me_-" the Beast said.

"It's my body, so I believe that I can do what I want with it," Elektra said resolutely, Matt allowing himself a slight smile as he saw Angel getting back to his feet, wincing slightly but already looking healthier than he had been earlier. "And right now, what I _want _is for you to go back to wherever the hell you came from- preferably back to Hell itself, I might add-, and let Matt and his friend get safely out of here."

"_You think it's as simple as _telling _me to leave, Miss Natchios_?" the Beast asked, smirking at the woman. "_I am the darkness in your hearts_-"

"And I'm _not _interested in brooding about that whole mess any more," Elektra countered, her gaze resolute as she stared the Beast down. "Matt was right; just because I made a few bad calls doesn't mean I have to define myself by them. I am _not _my mistakes, and I am _not _going to let you continue to torment me for them!"

"_You cannot_-!" the Beast began.

"Y'know what?" Angel said, glaring in frustration at the Beast, walking grimly over to stare at the demon. "I have had it up to _here _with people tormenting my friends about stuff by attacking them in their heads!"

With that, his face shifted into a new appearance that Matt guessed was his 'feeding face'- the fangs in his mouth were a definite clue- and punched the creature in the face, the Beast releasing its grip on Matt as it was sent staggering backwards. Before Matt or the Beast could prepare for another attack, Elektra had drawn one of her daggers and thrown it at the Beast's neck, impaling it straight through the neck and out the back. The Beast let out a strangled roar of rage, reaching up to remove the dagger as it glared at its adversaries, only for Angel to charge towards the Beast, yanking the dagger out with one hand as he used the other to deliver a powerful shove to the Beast's chest. As the Beast lost its balance once again, Angel followed the shove up with a powerful kick that sent the Beast falling over the edge of the roof, roaring in rage before the sound of a sudden thud indicated that it had struck the ground.

"Uh... would that... kill it?" Matt asked, looking uncertainly at Angel after a moment's pause. "I mean, if we're in Elektra's _mind_..."

"She wanted it dead, we wanted it dead, and it just experienced something that would kill most things in the real world," Angel said, looking resolutely at Matt. "Trust me; the Beast is essentially dead, which means in this case that it's been banished from Elektra's mind."

"So... I'm free?" Elektra asked, looking uncertainly at Angel, her earlier strength having apparently vanished as quickly as it had arrived, leaving her to stare weakly at the two men before her.

"You're free, Elektra," Angel confirmed, smiling reassuringly at her. "Whatever made you the host for the Beast originally, it's not in you any more."

Before Matt or Elektra could say anything to that statement, Angel stepped back from them and raised his face to the sky, smiling slightly as the darkness above them vanished to be replaced by light.

"We're out of here," he said.

Matt didn't even have time to ask before he had a sudden sensation that everything around him was falling away while he was simultaneously pulled upwards...

* * *

As he found himself faced with blackness once again as he 'woke up', Matt momentarily felt a sudden sadness at this rapid return to his blindness- no matter how much he had learned to adapt to his life without vision, there would always be a part of him that longed for the old days when he was able to get around without requiring him to pay so much attention to everything he was picking up-, but then he 'sensed' Elektra sitting up alongside him, and he instantly had more urgent matters to focus on.

"Elektra?" he said, the presence of others in the room forgotten as he reached out to touch her again, fighting the urge to sob with relief as he felt her skin underneath his fingers again, her heartbeat calmer and more controlled as opposed to the hatred and shock that had been present during their last moments of contact.

"Hey," she replied, the skin under his fingers shifting slightly in a manner that he was fairly sure would have been a smile if he could see it. "I'm... I'm back."

Then she broke down in his arms, her own arms wrapping around him as she cried, leaving Matt to be peripherally aware of Angel, Wesley, and Gunn (Probably Spike as well, but given the trouble that man caused his senses he couldn't be sure) leaving the room to give him and Elektra some much-needed privacy.

However, long Elektra's current reaction lasted, Matt already knew that he wanted to be alone with her until she had calmed down.

And after that...


	14. Taking Their Leave

**Disclaimer: **Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke

**Feedback: **Please do

_**Challenge: **Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name)._

_Requirements:_  
_Elektra being behind all the murders._  
_Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly._  
_Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel._  
_Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy._  
_Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost._

Blind Justice

"You're sure about this?" Angel asked, looking inquiringly at Matt as their new friend packed the last of his office belongings back into his briefcase while the vampire stood uncertainly in the door.

"Yeah, I'm sure," Matt replied, smiling slightly at Angel after sealing his case. "Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the opportunity you gave me here, both personally and professionally, but after everything Elektra's been through, I think she'd re-adjust to being back to normal better if she was in more familiar surroundings, and those definitely don't include spending time in a city where she spent so much time killing people."

Angel didn't bother reminding Matt that Elektra's memories of Los Angeles weren't always clear. Whatever kind of influence the Beast had exerted over Elektra, it had apparently taken more direct control of her when she was generally wandering around Los Angeles, most likely to stop her questioning what she was actually doing here, although she retained clearer memories of the occasions when she was called upon to actually kill anyone; most likely the Beast had concluded that she would be better at her job if she was actually the one in control when the time came to actually fight anybody.

Regardless of what she remembered, Angel had to concede that Matt's essential reasoning couldn't be argued with; Elektra had never been sent on any missions in New York, most likely to ensure that nobody from her past recognised her, so the city was probably the best place for her to get away from the memories of what she had done while the Beast controlled her.

"Don't forget to get in touch with us if she remembers anything else about whoever hired her," Angel added, after a moment's awkward silence had passed following his last comment. Elektra's memories of her time with the Hand were still vague, given that the Beast had been more directly exerting its control over her behaviour at that point, but that didn't mean that there wasn't a chance that she'd remember what else had happened to her at some point, which might include the identity of the person who had hired her to kill him in the first place.

"Count on it," Matt replied, nodding reassuringly at the vampire, pausing in his packing to look at his temporary boss with a reassuring smile. "And if you ever need any extra legal help over here...?"

"Just remember that it goes both ways," Angel said, holding out a hand to Matt. "If you need any back-up, consider us available."

As he shook the blind lawyer's hand, Angel had to hope that they would meet again some day.

Matt might not think that he was suited for their kind of life on a regular basis, but he'd clearly shown himself to be a worthy ally and a good friend for the short time that they'd spent together; if either of them ever needed the other's assistance, Angel had little doubt that either of them would be there for the other if they ever sent out a call for help.

* * *

As she walked into her lover's apartment, already shrugging off her jacket and shoes as she stepped over the threshold, Eve sighed apologetically as she looked over at where her lover lay in bed, staring contemplatively up at the ceiling.

"It didn't work," she said, resisting the urge to curse as she thought back on all the time and effort that had gone into the last couple of months. Hell, practically from the moment Angel had arrived at the office, Eve had been helping her lover work out a way to finish the vampire off.

_All that _effort_…_ Eve groaned to herself, as she unzipped her dress and let it pool around her feet as she looked over at her lover.

"Turns out the assassin we hired had been lovers with a new lawyer Angel had hired," she continued to say as she reached behind her back to unclip her bra. "The assassin might have been able to pull it off once she knew what she was up against, but with the lawyer ex added into the equation?"

She sighed in frustration once again as she removed her panties and walked over to the bed, looking apologetically at her lover. "It gave the gang all the incentive they needed to try something other than just beating her up. The last I saw of them, Angel was sending the lawyer and the ex back to New York to get some time to 'get reacquainted'."

As she slipped under the covers, her lover shrugged nonchalantly as he smiled over at her.

"Well, it was never the _best _chance in the world that the direct approach'd pay off," he said, looking at her tenderly as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer to him.

"And the fact that the loss of the Beast during a mission _we _asked its host to undertake has probably cost us any chance of getting support from the Hand?" Eve asked, looking at him with a slight smile.

"Wasn't like we were planning on using them again anyway," her partner replied casually. "Hiring an independent just _seemed_ like the best way to get him out of the picture right now; there's other ways."

Noting the emphasis on the word 'seemed', Eve looked up at her lover curiously.

"What do you mean?" she asked, raising an inquiring eyebrow at him.

"Had an idea for a little… alternative plan we could try out," her lover said, as he looked back down at her. "It occurred to me; if Angel's so keen on trying to do the whole 'Champion' gig while still running Wolfram & Hart, but _can't _do it like he used to without losing his clients- and, thus, his position- maybe we should… remind him of what he's missing?"

Eve was about to ask what her lover meant by that, when it occurred to her.

If Angel was reminded of how things _used _to be for him… _before _he had to take control of Wolfram & Hart, thus forcing to fight evil mainly in the conference room rather than on the streets, he'd start suffering from confidence issues, constantly questioning his decisions in life…

And, from there, it would be far easier to take him down from an angle that he wasn't expecting even now.

"But how?" she asked, looking inquiringly up at her lover.

"Simple enough," her lover replied.

A broad grin spreading across his face, Lindsey McDonald, former golden boy of the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram & Hart, looked down inquiringly at Eve as he held her in his arms, his brain already planning out the fine details of the plan that would defeat his greatest enemy once and for all.

"You wouldn't happen to remember the location of the equations that Texan chick was trying to use to give Spike his body back, would you?"

* * *

AN: Well, there you have it; my conclusion, tying the story into continuity while still leaving the potential open for some not-so-canon sequels with Matt and Elektra coming to help their new friends at some point...

I'm not saying I'll write anything new in this reality, but let's just say I'm open to suggestions and would also be willing for someone else to follow this up if they have a good idea and run it by me first.


End file.
